"SHE FLIES WITH HER OWN WINGS"
type: channel
description: THE COLLECTED SPEECHES OF ABIGAIL SCOTT DUNIWAY (1834-1915)
date: 2023-04-24T19:46:12Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
generator agent: https://wordpress.org/
items: “When the Revolutionary war cloud burst . . .” – circa October 19, 1915
items: “THE WOMAN SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT AND TWO KINDS OF PROHIBITION” – October 5, 1914
items: “HOME AND MOTHER” – September 7, 1914
items: PROGRESSIVE PARTY LUNCHEON – February 25, 1914
items: “GREETING AND REMINISCENCE” – October 6, 1913
items: OREGON PIONEER ASSOCIATION – June 19, 1913
items: OREGON STATE EQUAL SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION – November 20, 1909
items: OREGON PIONEER ASSOCIATION – June 11, 1909
items: PORTLAND CHARTER COMMISSION – January 26, 1909
items: OREGON STATE EQUAL SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION – November 27, 1908
items: WILLAMETTE VALLEY CHAUTAUQUA ASSEMBLY – July 18, 1908
items: “THE POWERS OF THOUGHT” – October 6, 1907
items: “THE VISIT OF NICODEMUS TO JESUS BY NIGHT” – Unknown
items: “EARLY PIONEER NURSING” – July 10, 1907
items: OREGON STATE EQUAL SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION – November 17, 1906
items: “UPWARD STEPS IN A THIRD OF A CENTURY” – circa February 7-13, 1906
items: BUSINESS WOMAN’S LEAGUE OF SAN FRANCISCO – November 17, 1905
items: LEWIS AND CLARK EXPOSITION – October 6, 1905
items: “THE PIONEER MOTHER” – July 6, 1905
items: OREGON FEDERATION OF WOMEN’S CLUBS – circa May-June, 1905
items: “PRESIDENTS PAST AND FUTURE” – circa Fall, 1903
items: “A PIONEER INCIDENT” – December 20, 1902
items: “EMINENT WOMEN I HAVE MET” – June 1, 1900
items: “SUCCESS IN SIGHT” – February 12, 1900
items: “HOW TO WIN THE BALLOT” – May 2, 1899
items: “WOMAN IN OREGON HISTORY” – February 14, 1899
items: OREGON STATE EQUAL SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION – November 20, 1897
items: “WOMAN IN JOURNALISM” – circa February-October, 1897
items: OREGON STATE EQUAL SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION – December 10, 1896
items: “The manifold duties of the mother . . .” – circa 1894-1896
items: NATIONAL AMERICAN WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION CONVENTION – circa January 31-February 5, 1895
items: “THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST” – June 1, 1893
items: “WOMAN SUFFRAGE AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY” – circa 1892
items: “EQUAL RIGHTS FOR ALL” – July 17, 1889
items: U.S. SENATE SELECT COMMITTEE ON WOMAN SUFFRAGE – January 24, 1889
items: “BALLOTS AND BULLETS” – January 23, 1889
items: VANCOUVER, WASHINGTON TERRITORY – July 4, 1885
items: U.S. SENATE SELECT COMMITTEE ON WOMAN SUFFRAGE – March 7, 1884
items: NATIONAL WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION CONVENTION – March 4, 1884
items: OREGON STATE WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION – February 12, 1884
items: ASTORIA, OREGON – August 9, 1883
items: OREGON STATE WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION – February 13, 1883
items: OREGON PIONEER ASSOCIATION – June 15, 1882
items: OREGON STATE WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION – October 18, 1881
items: OREGON STATE SENATE – October 7, 1880
items: OREGON STATE WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION – February 10, 1880
items: OREGON STATE WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION – February 11, 1879
items: OREGON STATE WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION – September 25, 1878
items: OREGON STATE WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION – August 7, 1878
items: WASHINGTON TERRITORY CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION – June 18, 1878
items: “CONSTITUTIONAL LIBERTY AND THE ARISTOCRACY OF SEX” – January 19, 1877
items: “THE DESTINY OF OUR REPUBLIC” – October 5, 1874
items: “OPPOSITION” – November 5, 1873
items: SAN FRANCISCO COUNTY WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION – January 4, 1871

“When the Revolutionary war cloud burst . . .” – circa October 19, 1915
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-17T18:50:37Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: Nothing is certain about this untitled, five-page, edited manuscript in the Abigail Scott Duniway Papers, except that Abigail wrote it. Most probably, she composed it in celebration of the 134th anniversary of Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown. Because she refers to herself in the third person, it seems intended for print, not the podium. And it is […]
encoded: Nothing is certain about this untitled, five-page, edited manuscript in the Abigail Scott Duniway Papers, except that Abigail wrote it. Most probably, she composed it in celebration of the 134th anniversary of Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown. Because she refers to herself in the third person, it seems intended for print, not the podium. And it is unfinished, lacking a conclusion.<a href="https://asduniway.org/%e2%80%9cwhen-the-revolutionary-war-cloud-burst-%e2%80%9d-october-19-1915/#footnote_1_123" id="identifier_1_123" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="A parenthetical notation, not in her hand and of unknown origin and reliability, attributes the text to “A.S.D. herself, Oct. 1915.” Accepting this at face value, October 19, the anniversary of the Revolution’s end, is by far the most likely (although examination of the Oregonian confirmed no celebratory event for which a text like this might have been intended.) A second, equally mysterious notation on the back of the final page reads “Oct. 18, 1915.” However, no sufficiently “historic day”–connected to the Revolution or otherwise–appears to correspond to this date. Other candidates for the occasion seem highly unlikely, including: October 12, Columbus Day (the day of her funeral, as things turned out); October 30, Oregon State Day at the Panama-Pacific Exposition (the San Francisco world’s fair), which she already had attended earlier in the year; or October 2, the final day of the Oregon State Fair, on which pioneers were honored. Although ghost-writing would have been exceedingly unusual, it is conceivable that this was intended to be delivered orally but, owing to her incapacitation, by someone other than herself. That she had surgery for an infected toe on October 2, but never recovered, may account for its unfinished condition.">1 In any event, this may well be the final item Abigail ever prepared for public consumption: She died on October 11, eight days before the anniversary and eleven…

“THE WOMAN SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT AND TWO KINDS OF PROHIBITION” – October 5, 1914
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-17T18:41:05Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: Now just a month before the November election, Scott Duniway continues to speak out against a prohibition measure on the ballot.1 This is an autobiographical account of her awakening to the cause of equal rights and opposition to Prohibition. Again one sees the personal experiences that stimulated her concern for the economic condition of women. The […]
encoded: Now just a month before the November election, Scott Duniway continues to speak out against a prohibition measure on the ballot.1 This is an autobiographical account of her awakening to the cause of equal rights and opposition to Prohibition. Again one sees the personal experiences that stimulated her concern for the economic condition of women. The phrase “two kinds of prohibition” encapsulates her argument, repeated hundreds of times, that it was philosophically inconsistent for advocates of woman’s rights to oppose prohibitions on women’s activities but support prohibition of men’s (i.e., drinking). The text is taken from a heavily edited typescript in the Abigail Scott Duniway Papers. According to her handwritten note at the beginning, this is a “stenographic report” of an address which Scott Duniway was to have delivered “at a mass meeting of citizens in Library Hall [Portland], October 5, from which she was detained by illness from attending in person.” Evidently, it was read in her absence, as the typescript itself is dated the following day, and identifies one D. A. Norton as reporter. Perhaps Scott Duniway then edited the address after its presentation. Most of this story is greatly embellished in the first sixty or so pages of Path Breaking, which itself was part of her unsuccessful campaign to defeat the measure.2 My attention was first directed to the Equal Suffrage Movement by learning through personal experience the legal financial handicap of the average married mother. I had been wooed and won by a young rancher, and taken from my school room to his Donation Land Claim, where I conscientiously attempted to perform the labors of a pioneer farmer’s wife and the duties attendant upon a rapidly increasingly family of many children. Many experiences occurred, one after another, that led me to see and understand the handicaps, financially speaking, of the mother who went from the school room, where she had her salary and could pay her expenses, to the home…

“HOME AND MOTHER” – September 7, 1914
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-17T18:12:31Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: By Labor Day, 1914, Americans had been honoring working men and women with a national holiday on the first Monday of September for twenty years.1 According to one historian, “a growing consensus that the government must do more to correct the evils of industrial capitalism” was emerging. Yet, while gains had been made, this remained […]
encoded: By Labor Day, 1914, Americans had been honoring working men and women with a national holiday on the first Monday of September for twenty years.<a href="https://asduniway.org/%e2%80%9chome-and-mother%e2%80%9d-september-7-1914/#footnote_1_119" id="identifier_1_119" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="Labor historian Philip Foner asserts that Labor Day was observed first and informally in 1885; Oregon became the first state to make it an official holiday in 1887; and it became a national legal holiday in 1894 (First Facts 92). However, reporting on the events of this day, the Morning Oregonian claims that the Knights of Labor first held a parade in New York in 1882; the Knights settled on the first Monday in September in 1884; Colorado was the first state to declare it a holiday, in 1887; and it is celebrated in every state and territory except Nevada, North Dakota and Wyoming, while in Louisiana it is celebrated only in New Orleans parish (7 Sept. 1914; cf. Corning 138).">1 According to one historian, “a growing consensus that the government must do more to correct the evils of industrial capitalism” was emerging. Yet, while gains had been made, this remained a tumultuous time for the labor movement, its future far from certain. In Woodrow Wilson, labor had a modest friend in the White House and other allies (such as Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan) in the Administration. The nation’s first Secretary of Labor, former mine worker William Wilson, had begun to attempt to mediate worker grievances against employers. In June, Representative Henry De Lamar Clayton, a Democrat from Alabama, had introduced a bill declaring that “the labor of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce,” guaranteeing the right of trade unions to exist, legalizing peaceful picketing, boycotts, and strikes, limiting the use of injunctions against striking workers, and providing for jury trials in criminal contempt cases; Samuel Gompers of the American Fed…

PROGRESSIVE PARTY LUNCHEON – February 25, 1914
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-17T17:48:12Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: According to one historian, 1912 represented “the high tide of Northwest progressivism.” That year, Idaho joined Washington and Oregon in adopting the initiative, referendum, and recall, while Oregon joined her sisters in approving woman suffrage. And many reformers, typically Protestant, middle-class Republicans, were swept up in third-party politics, when former Republican chief executive Theodore Roosevelt […]
encoded: According to one historian, 1912 represented “the high tide of Northwest progressivism.” That year, Idaho joined Washington and Oregon in adopting the initiative, referendum, and recall, while Oregon joined her sisters in approving woman suffrage. And many reformers, typically Protestant, middle-class Republicans, were swept up in third-party politics, when former Republican chief executive Theodore Roosevelt again ran for President, this time as the head of his own Progressive, or “Bull Moose,” Party. Roosevelt outpolled incumbent Republican William Howard Taft nationally, and carried Washington, but lost to Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who carried Oregon and Idaho.1 The women of Webfoot fared better, although the margin was slim: Out of 118,369 votes cast, their majority was 4,161.2 Although progressive, reformist currents were diverse and far-reaching, the third-party experiment was short-lived and, arguably, counterproductive: By 1916, Roosevelt had returned to the Republican fold and progressives discovered that they had surrendered the party to conservatives bent on undoing past reforms.3 But during its limited life, the local party organization invited Scott Duniway to its weekly luncheon at the Portland Hotel. She must have seemed like one of them: a Protestant, middle-class professional and reform-minded Republican. Certainly, woman suffrage was a legacy of progressivism’s faith in human reason and the innate morality of persons, tenets that Abigail shared.4 However, prohibition was one reform, embraced by many Progressives, that Scott Duniway never could accept. In earlier days, fearing prohibition’s “boomerang” upon woman suffrage, she sought to separate the two causes in the public mind. But now her attention would shift to battling prohibition itself, particularly an amendment that would be on the November ballot.<a href="https://asduniway.org/progressive-party-luncheon-february-25-1914/#footnote_5_117" id="identifier_5_117" class="footnote-link footnote-id…

“GREETING AND REMINISCENCE” – October 6, 1913
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-17T16:56:34Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: Delivered to the State Federation of Women’s Clubs, this speech is a narrative history of the club movement, with a surprising twist: Scott Duniway suggests that women’s clubs were organized as a way to quell the Prohibition “boomerang” (her term for the counterproductive effect that she believed Prohibition had on the cause of equal suffrage), […]
encoded: Delivered to the State Federation of Women’s Clubs, this speech is a narrative history of the club movement, with a surprising twist: Scott Duniway suggests that women’s clubs were organized as a way to quell the Prohibition “boomerang” (her term for the counterproductive effect that she believed Prohibition had on the cause of equal suffrage), essentially by providing alternative avenues for women’s civic and political impulses. Both here and in Path Breaking, Scott Duniway credits this “logical and necessary” idea to her close friend, Abigail Howard Hunt Stuart, who, almost thirty years earlier, had confided her rationale for starting the Woman’s Club of Olympia as an opportunity for “women who oppose the Suffrage Movement (or think they do) . . . to divest themselves of their prejudices.”1 Divestiture would be a rocky and incomplete process. Scott Duniway comments here that she often was “publicly reprimanded” for interjecting “telling shots for Equal Suffrage” into club meetings. The national federation of women’s clubs assiduously dodged the question.2 Nonetheless, that Abigail–who certainly was shrewd, if sometimes impolitic–felt sufficiently comfortable to air these sentiments publicly at a state-wide gathering of club representatives speaks to the distance that the club movement in Oregon had traveled in nearly twenty years.<a href="https://asduniway.org/%e2%80%9cgreeting-and-reminiscence%e2%80%9d-october-6-1913/#footnote_3_115" id="identifier_3_115" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="Some corroboration comes from Sara Bard Field (1882-1974), a renowned poet, Christian socialist, and third-generation suffragist (also companion and eventual wife of Charles Erskine Scott Wood), who, in her late twenties, became the state organizer for the successful 1912 campaign. She personally was not keen on the clubs because they tended to study “piffling” things. In hindsight, however, she thought they had been “a help” in promoting woman suffrage, and …

OREGON PIONEER ASSOCIATION – June 19, 1913
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-16T23:13:31Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: This is the fourth speech in this collection that Scott Duniway delivered to the association, in which she and her family (pioneers of 1852) had been active for many, many years. It also is the first that was delivered after Oregon women were enfranchised in 1912. The occasion was the association’s forty-first annual reunion, at […]
encoded: This is the fourth speech in this collection that Scott Duniway delivered to the association, in which she and her family (pioneers of 1852) had been active for many, many years. It also is the first that was delivered after Oregon women were enfranchised in 1912. The occasion was the association’s forty-first annual reunion, at which “something over 900 white haired men and women, Oregon’s trail blazers, held a campfire meeting in the Masonic Temple” in Portland; although Abigail would turn 79 in four months, she was a comparative youngster in a crowd featuring many celebrants in their eighties and nineties. The reunion was a day-long affair. First, the pioneers gathered at the Oregon Historical Society and walked (reportedly, only a few of the feeblest rode in the automobiles that had been arranged) through a steady drizzle (“scorning umbrellas”) to the courthouse plaza for a group photograph. Then there were meetings, speeches of welcome, and music. A banquet was given in the Armory by the Women’s Auxiliary. That evening, new officers were elected, resolutions were adopted, including one petitioning the legislature to mark the old Oregon Trail, Mrs. Sarah J. Hill of St. Johns was named “mother queen,” and the campfire program began. Presided over by Col. Robert A. Miller, there were more musical selections and speeches from notables like Cyrus Walker, son of Elkanah and Mary Richardson Walker; former Governor T. T. Geer; and Dr. Bethenia Angelina Owens-Adair, the first woman physician on the Pacific Coast, who came overland in the Applegate wagon train of 1843. Also delivering a fittingly nostalgic campfire talk, “five minutes, hot from the skillet, selected from the pioneers present, preference given to the women,” was Abigail. The newspapers reported that, even though called upon without notice, she “cloth[ed] her thoughts in well chosen words” and made “the most beautiful speech in her long career as a speaker.” The text is taken from a five-page manuscript in…

OREGON STATE EQUAL SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION – November 20, 1909
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-16T23:11:26Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: Midway through the “tax-paying women” suffrage campaign, the O.S.E.S.A. held its thirty-ninth anniversary meeting in the home of the late Senator Joseph Norton Dolph. Scott Duniway’s optimistic Presidential address attributes increasing success to “the aid of far-seeing and justice-loving men,” and the 1908 failure at the polls to “timid or selfish men” and “the debased […]
encoded: Midway through the “tax-paying women” suffrage campaign, the O.S.E.S.A. held its thirty-ninth anniversary meeting in the home of the late Senator Joseph Norton Dolph. Scott Duniway’s optimistic Presidential address attributes increasing success to “the aid of far-seeing and justice-loving men,” and the 1908 failure at the polls to “timid or selfish men” and “the debased and criminal classes.” She reiterates that suffrage advocates should steer clear of prohibition and, of course, warns women not to antagonize men. While these themes are staples in her repertoire, they are updated here to fit newer circumstances.1 By this time, the Women’s Social and Political Union had England in an uproar. For four years women had been demonstrating, sometimes smashing windows and committing arson, disrupting public meetings and Edwardian sensibilities. Often they were beaten and jailed. Emmeline Goulden Pankhurst formed the W.S.P.U. in 1903. Attempting to gain adherents among factory workers in Manchester and other textile centers, activists began holding outdoor meetings and interrupting government speakers at public gatherings to ask their position on suffrage. In 1905, Annie Kenney, a factory worker, and Emmeline’s daughter, Christabel, were “forcibly ejected” from a meeting for heckling Sir Edward Grey; bystanders and police then physically assaulted and arrested them. From then on, the W.S.P.U. “set about deliberately provoking violent police reprisals in order to embarrass party leaders to the point where they would feel compelled to do something about woman suffrage.” Eventually women began using violence themselves, throwing stones, breaking windows, pouring acid into mailboxes, and attacking members of the government with whips or their bare hands. Just months before Abigail’s speech, in July, an imprisoned suffragette named Marion Dunlop had refused to eat, insisting that she was a political prisoner. Fearing that she would starve and become a martyr, the authorities rel…

OREGON PIONEER ASSOCIATION – June 11, 1909
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-16T23:07:08Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: At the business portion of the Association’s thirty-seventh annual session, meeting in the Masonic Temple, a momentous gift was presented to the Oregon Historical Society. Charlotte Terwilliger Moffett Cartwright1, “an honored pioneer of 1845,” conveyed “a tract of land on Clatsop Beach, near the Seaside Hotel, at Seaside, upon which is situated the salt cairn […]
encoded: At the business portion of the Association’s thirty-seventh annual session, meeting in the Masonic Temple, a momentous gift was presented to the Oregon Historical Society. Charlotte Terwilliger Moffett Cartwright<a href="https://asduniway.org/oregon-pioneer-association-june-11-1909/#footnote_1_108" id="identifier_1_108" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="(1842-1915): born Hancock County, Illinois; of Dutch descent; family removed overland to Oregon, 1845; married Walter Gray Moffett, 1860; two children; married Charles M. Cartwright, 1897; four children; resided Portland; Unitarian; chair, Women’s Auxiliary, Oregon Pioneer Association, for fifteen years; honorary president, 1912; died Gearhart (Oregon Pioneer Index, OR Hist. Soc.).">1, “an honored pioneer of 1845,” conveyed “a tract of land on Clatsop Beach, near the Seaside Hotel, at Seaside, upon which is situated the salt cairn or furnace which was erected by Lewis and Clark, early in January, 1806, for the purpose of distilling salt from the ocean water to supply the needs of the company.”2 This property was “of great historical importance by reason of the fact that, so far as known, this salt cairn is the only physical evidence left of the presence of the Lewis and Clark Exploring Expedition in the Oregon country.” The deed to this property was presented to Frederick V. Holman, president of the Society, by J. E. Majers, president of the Association. Following Holman’s short address expressing his appreciation, Scott Duniway “replied to Mr Holman, on behalf of Mrs. Cartwright, in a few felicitous remarks” that manage to insinuate an equal suffrage message into this ceremony. Of course, Abigail was active in other aspects of the reunion as well. Particularly “amusing” was a conversation with Cyrus H. Walker3, of Albany, “the oldest native son of white parents now living,” and Dr. Bethenia Angelina Owens-Adair, “a pioneer of 1843,” that was conducted in the Chinook jargon language devised by ear…

PORTLAND CHARTER COMMISSION – January 26, 1909
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-16T23:02:11Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: The progressive currents making headway across the United States in the early years of the twentieth century influenced Oregon as well.1 In August, 1908, during Democrat-cum-populist Harry Lane’s2 second term as Mayor of Portland, a Charter Commission began to consider alternative forms of municipal government such as the recently-devised “Des Moines Plan” of government by nonpartisan, […]
encoded: The progressive currents making headway across the United States in the early years of the twentieth century influenced Oregon as well.1 In August, 1908, during Democrat-cum-populist Harry Lane’s<a href="https://asduniway.org/portland-charter-commission-january-26-1909/#footnote_2_106" id="identifier_2_106" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="(1855-1917): Portland’s first populist mayor, who clashed repeatedly with corrupt authorities; born Corvallis; graduated with medical degree from Willamette University, 1876; appointed superintendent, state hospital for insane, 1887; mayor, 1905-09; U.S. Senate, 1913 until death, where worked particularly in child labor, pure food, and Indian affairs; final Senate vote was against resolution committing U.S. to entry in World War I; grandson of Gen. Joseph Lane, first territorial governor; Democrat (Corning 142; “Biography: Lane, Harry,” Vertical File, OR Hist. Soc.).">2 second term as Mayor of Portland, a Charter Commission began to consider alternative forms of municipal government such as the recently-devised “Des Moines Plan” of government by nonpartisan, elected commissioners. For months the Commission was the epicenter of fierce political wrangling.<a href="https://asduniway.org/portland-charter-commission-january-26-1909/#footnote_3_106" id="identifier_3_106" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="The full story cannot be told here. Suffice it to note that the Commission’s chair, Republican Henry E. McGinn, was an old political rival of Lane’s (defeating Lane in a state senate race in 1901) and that, in April, 1909, the City Council was presented with two competing new charters. The commission form of government finally replaced the old councilmanic ward system in 1912, Lane’s last year as mayor (Dodds 173).">3 Midway through the Commission’s deliberations, soon after launching the statewide campaign for suffrage for tax-paying women, and just days after progressives managed to revoke the …

OREGON STATE EQUAL SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION – November 27, 1908
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-16T22:56:26Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: Five months after “another dismal defeat” at the polls, the thirty-eighth annual convention of O.S.E.S.A. met at the Portland Commercial Club. Among others, Clara Bewick Colby1 spoke about the suffrage efforts of London women, Myrtle E. Pease2 reported on her efforts as the association’s organizer, and Sarah A. Evans3 described the national convention of Federated […]
encoded: Five months after “another dismal defeat” at the polls, the thirty-eighth annual convention of O.S.E.S.A. met at the Portland Commercial Club. Among others, Clara Bewick Colby<a href="https://asduniway.org/oregon-state-equal-suffrage-association-november-27-1908/#footnote_1_104" id="identifier_1_104" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="Clara Dorothy Bewick Colby (1846-1916): born Gloucester, England; raised in Wisconsin; graduated valedictorian, University of Wisconsin, Madison, having followed regular men’s curriculum in philosophy and Latin; moved to Beatrice, Nebraska, 1872; helped organize Nebraska Woman Suffrage Association, 1881; president, 1885-98; editor, Woman’s Tribune, 1883-1909, which came to be regarded as official organ of National Woman Suffrage Association; moved to Washington, D.C., after 1888; worked to achieve “Minor plan” for suffrage, devised by husband of Virginia Louisa Minor (losing plaintiff of Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. 162, 1875; Pinkney), who argued that women, as “people,” possessed Constitutional right to vote for members of House of Representatives, which Congress could effectuate by simple majority vote; declining subscriptions to Woman’s Tribune and divorce encouraged her to make fresh start in Portland, 1904, eventuating in power struggle for O.S.W.S.A. leadership; entry in Notable American Women ignores this conflict, saying only that Bewick Colby “participated in several state suffrage campaigns led by” Scott Duniway (Green; Jerry, “Clara Bewick Colby”).">1 spoke about the suffrage efforts of London women, Myrtle E. Pease<a href="https://asduniway.org/oregon-state-equal-suffrage-association-november-27-1908/#footnote_2_104" id="identifier_2_104" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="Myrtle Evalyne Pease Hatfield (1873-1913): born Newton, Iowa; daughter of Clinton W. (1839-1913) and Margaret A. Pease; came to Oregon with parents, 1899; taught school in Albany for five years, c. 1904, then two yea…

WILLAMETTE VALLEY CHAUTAUQUA ASSEMBLY – July 18, 1908
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-16T22:51:26Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: The Willamette Valley Chautauqua Association was incorporated in 1895 “for the general promotion of religious, scientific and educational interests.”1 Each summer, for almost two weeks in July, the association conducted assemblies on the grounds of Gladstone Park in Oregon City. According to its promotional programs, the shaded, seventy-four-acre park with “scenery that invites the tourist […]
encoded: The Willamette Valley Chautauqua Association was incorporated in 1895 “for the general promotion of religious, scientific and educational interests.”1 Each summer, for almost two weeks in July, the association conducted assemblies on the grounds of Gladstone Park in Oregon City. According to its promotional programs, the shaded, seventy-four-acre park with “scenery that invites the tourist from distant lands” boasted “the largest auditorium west of the Rocky mountains,” seating three thousand, with “restaurants, postoffice and telephone on the grounds.” Its program was “second only to the great New York Chautauqua,” with “speakers of national fame” and numerous departments of instruction ranging from music, elocution, art, and kindergarten to the Bible, physical culture, botany, entomology, and English literature. Each season saw special days organized: Christian Endeavor Day, Y.M.C.A. Day, Patriotic Day, College Day, William Jennings Bryan Day, Joaquin Miller Day, and so on. These special days notwithstanding, “[e]very day presents a program complete in itself of science, music, art, wit, oratory, stereoptican views, bicycle riding and athletics.” The chautauqua’s expenses were “the lowest of any assembly in the world”: $1.50 bought a season ticket that included camping privileges. The “wise” patron who sought a “sylvan camping spot” was assured that “a city of tents will be laid out in regular streets and avenues,” while the “fastidious” guest who preferred a luxurious hotel was reassured that Portland was only forty minutes away. From its inception, the Chautauqua hosted a Woman’s Day, “a congress of women interested in all progress, temperance, equal suffrage and missions,” and women speakers were a familiar sight on the platform.<a href="https://asduniway.org/willamette-valley-chautauqua-assembly-circa-july-18-1908/#footnote_2_102" id="identifier_2_102" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="The zenith of female oratory may have been the 1905 ass…

“THE POWERS OF THOUGHT” – October 6, 1907
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-16T22:45:19Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: In this second address before the Society of Bible Spiritualists, meeting in A.O.U.W. Temple1, Scott Duniway examines another dimension of the paranormal: hypnotism. Her immediate concern is the recent murder trial of Charles H. Reynolds in the shooting death of George Herbert Hibbins, who was having an affair with Reynolds’ wife, Lulu.2 Although Abigail thinks […]
encoded: In this second address before the Society of Bible Spiritualists, meeting in A.O.U.W. Temple1, Scott Duniway examines another dimension of the paranormal: hypnotism. Her immediate concern is the recent murder trial of Charles H. Reynolds in the shooting death of George Herbert Hibbins, who was having an affair with Reynolds’ wife, Lulu.<a href="https://asduniway.org/%e2%80%9cthe-powers-of-thought%e2%80%9d-october-6-1907/#footnote_2_100" id="identifier_2_100" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="On June 19, 1907, Reynolds, a former scout for General George Armstrong Custer and owner of the Natatorium Baths at Second and Washington in Portland, shot Hibbins (a.k.a. George Herbert), of Walla Walla, after discovering the music professor together with his wife in their home.">2 Although Abigail thinks that Mrs. Reynolds must have been under Hibbins’ “Svengalian spell,” she does not condone the woman’s actions on this account. In fact, she takes umbrage at those who have excused the woman’s weakness while laying all the villainy on the man. However, this is not because Abigail thinks that hypnotism is a fraud and the woman blameless. On the contrary, she takes for granted that hypnotism exists as a power of the mind, and that Hibbins’ use of this power was evil. But, she believes, Mrs. Reynolds was duty-bound to “parry” his hypnotic influence “by the power of her own thought and action.” Here is evident the same faith in knowledge and reason as antidote to evil, and the same emphasis on personal moral responsibility, that Abigail also displays in other contexts. Yet, it is ironic that, here, her faith is tempered by an image of frail, vulnerable, mentally overpowered womanhood. The text is taken from the Morning Oregonian of October 7, 1907, which quotes Abigail “in part”: It is related of God’s servant, Job, that, when suffering under dire affliction, the old man, in answer to a taunt, exclaimed: “Shall we receive good at the hands of God, and shall we n…

“THE VISIT OF NICODEMUS TO JESUS BY NIGHT” – Unknown
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-16T22:44:28Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: Although this archive might suggest that Scott Duniway’s public address was devoted almost exclusively to the topics of equal rights, the status of women, and prohibition, such was not the case. During the periodic economic upheavals of the late nineteenth century, for example, she lectured frequently on “Labor Unrest and Political Upheavals” and “Removing the […]
encoded: Although this archive might suggest that Scott Duniway’s public address was devoted almost exclusively to the topics of equal rights, the status of women, and prohibition, such was not the case. During the periodic economic upheavals of the late nineteenth century, for example, she lectured frequently on “Labor Unrest and Political Upheavals” and “Removing the Cause of Strikes.” Another talk in her repertoire was “Woman and the Bible.” She often entertained audiences by reminiscing about “The Life and Times of Col. E. D. Baker<a href="https://asduniway.org/%e2%80%9cthe-visit-of-nicodemus-to-jesus-by-night%e2%80%9d-unknown/#footnote_1_98" id="identifier_1_98" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="Edward Dickinson Baker (1811-1861): statesman, soldier, and orator; born London; emigrated to Philadelphia, 1816; entered law practice, Carrolton, Illinois, 1828; major during Black Hawk War, 1832; Lincoln’s closest friend, and law partner, 1837; Whig; Illinois legislature, 1837-45; U.S. Representative, 1845, 1849-51; distinguished himself in Mexican War, 1846; supervised construction of Panama railroad, 1851; moved to San Francisco, 1852, and gained high reputation as criminal lawyer and orator; by invitation, moved to Oregon, 1859, where, one year later, and despite Democratic opposition, the first state senate elected him Oregon’s first Republican Senator; “the foremost man in debate in that illustrious body”; colonel of a regiment of volunteers, killed in battle of Ball’s Bluff, Virginia, first northern officer to die in Civil War; “Excepting our own Webster, no man of modern times has been so successful as Baker in the forum, in the Senate, and before popular assemblies” (Corning 17; Shuck 63-83). Baker was a Scott family benefactor. In 1846 he extended credit to Tucker Scott, Abigail’s father, to buy the first circular sawmill west of Ohio, and three years later made the latter his exclusive agent for selling Page’s Portable Saw Mills throughout Illinoi…

“EARLY PIONEER NURSING” – July 10, 1907
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-16T22:41:34Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: Scott Duniway spoke this Wednesday afternoon at the quarterly meeting of the Oregon State Nurses’ Association, on the grounds of the North Pacific Sanatorium.1 This address, one of the few that are not explicitly or primarily political in content, combines two subjects of recurring interest to her: the exploits of the pioneers and women’s superiority […]
encoded: Scott Duniway spoke this Wednesday afternoon at the quarterly meeting of the Oregon State Nurses’ Association, on the grounds of the North Pacific Sanatorium.<a href="https://asduniway.org/%e2%80%9cearly-pioneer-nursing%e2%80%9d-july-10-1907/#footnote_1_96" id="identifier_1_96" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="Prior to 1890, there were no nursing schools in Oregon, and only a few trained nurses who had migrated from the east; when the first school, affiliated with Good Samaritan Hospital, opened that year, Portland had seventy thousand inhabitants and three trained nurses. At the time of Abigail’s speech, five or six schools were operating in the state. Although the Portland Visiting Nurse Association had been formed two years earlier, the first statewide organization was founded in 1904 when forty-five nurses met at Good Samaritan to establish the Oregon State Association for Trained Nurses. Its objectives were: to raise and maintain a fund for the benefit of sick nurses; to advance the profession of nursing; to aid the sick poor; and to develop a loyal and sympathetic feeling among nurses. The president of the Association when Abigail spoke was Linna (Linnie) G. Richardson, who later would become Mrs. Linnie Laird (American Journal of Nursing). In the early days, most were independent, private duty nurses; they provided care in the home, especially for tuberculosis and typhoid victims, in unsanitary conditions, with family members exposed to the disease, because there were very few hospital beds for the city’s poor. And the “professionalization” of nursing to which Scott Duniway refers was still in its early stages: Legislation requiring that nurses be licensed and registered, for example, would not be adopted until 1911 (Boufford).">1 This address, one of the few that are not explicitly or primarily political in content, combines two subjects of recurring interest to her: the exploits of the pioneers and women’s superiority to men in matters …

OREGON STATE EQUAL SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION – November 17, 1906
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-16T22:38:45Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: If 1900 and its aftermath had been a test of Scott Duniway’s “still hunt” tactics, then 1906 became equally a test of the vigorous public campaign methods (the so-called “hurrah” tactics) and the suffrage-temperance alliance espoused by others. When the referendum failed (disastrously, with a larger “nay” vote than six years before), Scott Duniway interpreted […]
encoded: If 1900 and its aftermath had been a test of Scott Duniway’s “still hunt” tactics, then 1906 became equally a test of the vigorous public campaign methods (the so-called “hurrah” tactics) and the suffrage-temperance alliance espoused by others. When the referendum failed (disastrously, with a larger “nay” vote than six years before), Scott Duniway interpreted defeat as final repudiation of the National’s methods and planned a comeback. Some, of course, blamed Abigail herself. Ada Wallace Unruh<a href="https://asduniway.org/oregon-state-equal-suffrage-association-november-17-1906/#footnote_1_94" id="identifier_1_94" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="She was organizing mass temperance meetings in the state as early as 1893; organized four unions in Crook County the following year, including one on the Warms Springs reservation; state W.C.T.U. corresponding secretary, 1907, president, c. 1909-12 (Crawford 5-9). On the W.C.T.U.’s efforts in the Pacific Northwest more generally, see Soden.">1, a national W.C.T.U. organizer, called her “the great obstacle to equal suffrage in the state” who “offends the moral and Christian element in the movement.” So when the association convened five months later at the home of Lucy A. Rose Mallory<a href="https://asduniway.org/oregon-state-equal-suffrage-association-november-17-1906/#footnote_2_94" id="identifier_2_94" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="(1846-1920): daughter of Aaron Rose and Minerva Kelley (or Kellogg); mother died at Lucy’s birth; father remarried fifteen months later and family emigrated to Oregon from Michigan, 1851, settling on donation claim that became Roseburg, named after family; married Rufus Mallory (1831-1914), prominent attorney and politician, who arrived in Jacksonville from Iowa, 1859, on June 24, 1860, when 14, in Roseburg, where he had taught school for fifteen months and she had been his pupil; he was state attorney, 1860, 1862-66, in state legislature, 1862, U.…

“UPWARD STEPS IN A THIRD OF A CENTURY” – circa February 7-13, 1906
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-16T22:34:02Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: When the National American Woman Suffrage Association met for its thirty-eighth convention at the Lyric Theatre in Baltimore, “the need of the hour” was Oregon. Throughout its proceedings, the upcoming June referendum “was the uppermost thought”: Appeals were made for funds, plans were made in business meetings, and “hopeful” speeches of “probable success” were delivered.1 […]
encoded: When the National American Woman Suffrage Association met for its thirty-eighth convention at the Lyric Theatre in Baltimore, “the need of the hour” was Oregon. Throughout its proceedings, the upcoming June referendum “was the uppermost thought”: Appeals were made for funds, plans were made in business meetings, and “hopeful” speeches of “probable success” were delivered.1 One of these speeches was written by the embattled former president of the Oregon State Equal Suffrage Association, Abigail Scott Duniway; when she could not attend, it was presented by another delegate from the Land of Webfoot, her niece, Lillian Cooke Olds.<a href="https://asduniway.org/%e2%80%9cupward-steps-in-a-third-of-a-century%e2%80%9d-circa-february-7-13-1906/#footnote_2_92" id="identifier_2_92" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="(?-1914): born Lafayette, Oregon; daughter of Amos and Mary Frances Scott Cook (1833-1930), Abigail’s older sister; married William Parker Olds (1857-?), successful merchant who was president of Olds, Wortman, and King department store, Portland Woolen Mills, and Portland Retail Dealers Association, 1880; active in Unitarian Church, Women’s Union, Mann Old People’s Home, and Florence Crittenton Home; loved music and literature; died April 6, of heart failure after several months of ill health (Gaston, Portland 2: 400-03; Oregon Daily Journal 7 Apr. 1914; Morning Oregonian 7 Apr. 1914; Scrapbook #49: 206, OR Hist. Soc.).">2 Amid continuing controversy over her past leadership and methods, Scott Duniway felt compelled to defend herself. Thus, this address melds several familiar themes. It lavishes praise on Oregon and on the progressive thinking to be found there. It appeals to the “chivalrous” instincts of the men who live there. It also posits ever-increasing support for the cause of equal suffrage, in order to convey a sense of momentum–even inevitability–and thereby reassure doubters and detractors. More antagonistically, Scott Duniway rebukes…

BUSINESS WOMAN’S LEAGUE OF SAN FRANCISCO – November 17, 1905
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-16T22:28:28Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: By 1905 the woman’s club movement certainly was well-established, even on the West Coast. However, it was not universally acclaimed. On Monday, November 13, the local district of the Federated Women’s Clubs of California assembled in San Francisco for its annual convention, prompting the Reverend Frederick W. Clampett, rector of the city’s Trinity Church, to […]
encoded: By 1905 the woman’s club movement certainly was well-established, even on the West Coast. However, it was not universally acclaimed. On Monday, November 13, the local district of the Federated Women’s Clubs of California assembled in San Francisco for its annual convention, prompting the Reverend Frederick W. Clampett, rector of the city’s Trinity Church, to chastise the “new women” meeting nearby: Women are taking more and more the place of men, and the undoubted effect of this has been to change in great measure the special place that women should occupy. She is now paying, and paying hard, for her keen competition with man. We can behold the change in the gradual decline of that gallant and courteous relationship that the past so strongly portrays as between men and women. She must stand up in the crowded cars and hold on to the strap. . . . The stream of tendency is against home influences, the permanence of the marriage tie, the glory of offspring. Woman must assert her womanhood in rebellion against those influences.”<a href="https://asduniway.org/business-woman%e2%80%99s-league-of-san-francisco-november-17-1905/#footnote_1_90" id="identifier_1_90" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="The Federation district meeting was reported in the San Francisco Chronicle on Monday, November 13, 1905. Apparently, Clampett rebuked the women both before and after: “from the pulpit” on Sunday, the 12th and, again, before the Episcopal Convocation of San Francisco, meeting in Grace Church, on Tuesday, the 14th (San Francisco Examiner 18 Nov. 1905; San Francisco Chronicle 15 Nov. 1905). The San Francisco Chronicle published Clampett’s remarks on the front page on November 15, in a story entitled “New Woman Rebuked,” which also quotes several dissenting fellow clergy. The Chronicle also reported reactions of several members of the Forum Club in “The Ladies and the Cleric” on November 16.">1 Scott Duniway, who arrived in the city on Wednesday, the 15th 2, undoubt…

LEWIS AND CLARK EXPOSITION – October 6, 1905
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-16T22:26:39Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: The centennial of the Expedition of Discovery, the first to reach the Oregon Territory by land, demanded a celebration. With the heavy financial backing of a consortium of twenty-five Portland businessmen, a fair was held in the Guild’s Lake district of Portland, where three Federal and twenty Oregon state buildings, and buildings and exhibits representing […]
encoded: The centennial of the Expedition of Discovery, the first to reach the Oregon Territory by land, demanded a celebration. With the heavy financial backing of a consortium of twenty-five Portland businessmen, a fair was held in the Guild’s Lake district of Portland, where three Federal and twenty Oregon state buildings, and buildings and exhibits representing sixteen other states and sixteen foreign countries, were on display. The cornerstone had been laid by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1903. Opening on June 1, 1905, the Exposition attracted over 2.5 million visitors during its eighteen week run.1 The fair honored a number of pioneers. October 6 was Abigail Scott Duniway Day. She was the only woman to be so recognized, and her selection prompted the Woman’s Tribune to observe: “In choosing Mrs. Duniway as the representative of her sex, it is not presumption to claim that it was the intention of the Exposition management to declare itself in favor of equal rights for the women of Oregon, for this is what Mrs. Duniway’s life and work stand for”2 Ceremonies were conducted in the Oregon Building on the fairgrounds in Portland, “thronged to [its] utmost capacity.” While De Caprio’s band “beguiled” those present, Abigail met guests in a receiving line that included Dr. Viola M. Coe<a href="https://asduniway.org/lewis-and-clark-exposition-october-6-1905/#footnote_3_87" id="identifier_3_87" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="Viola May Boley Coe: M.D.; born Bourbon, Indiana; married Henry Waldo Coe (1857-1927), also prominent physician of mental and nervous diseases, in North Dakota, 1882; four children; graduate, Woman’s Medical College of Chicago, 1890; removed to Oregon, 1890; began practice in Portland, 1891; founded Mindsease Hospital, Portland, 1897, Mt. Tabor Sanitarium, 1900, Coe Hospital and maternity home, Portland, 1910; helped organize Home for Unemployed Women Without Means; president (or acting president, O.S.W.S.A., 1905-12; delegate, Inter…

“THE PIONEER MOTHER” – July 6, 1905
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-16T22:16:19Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: Nineteenth-century women seeking to justify a larger role in public life often looked to exceptional historical women as models. Scott Duniway, for example, fondly invoked Abigail Adams, for whom she was named. At the turn of the next century, an obscure native woman known to Lewis and Clark would become the most important heroine in […]
encoded: Nineteenth-century women seeking to justify a larger role in public life often looked to exceptional historical women as models. Scott Duniway, for example, fondly invoked Abigail Adams, for whom she was named. At the turn of the next century, an obscure native woman known to Lewis and Clark would become the most important heroine in the cause of woman’s rights. Although Sacagawea had her admirers as early as 1893, the legend of the Shoshone maiden who, baby on her back, guided the Corps of Discovery through the wilderness was popularized by Eva Emery Dye’s historical novel, The Conquest: The True Story of Lewis and Clark, in 1902. In fact, it has been suggested that Dye, a writer of some repute who happened to be Clackamas County chair of the O.S.E.S.A., manufactured the now-familiar Sacagawea myth for suffrage ends in the wake of the defeat of 1900.1 While this probably exaggerates Dye’s intentions, just as the myth exaggerates Sacagawea’s importance to the Corps of Discovery, it is undeniable that suffragists quickly appropriated the Shoshone woman as a forebear: Sacagawea soon became closely associated with the movement, both in Oregon and nationally. Certainly Dye’s close friend, Abigail Scott Duniway, was quick to seize on the new strategy. She happened to be president of the Portland Woman’s Club when it created the Sacajawea Statue Association (with Dye at the helm) for the purpose of securing a statue of Sacagawea for the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition.2 A Denver sculptress, Alice Cooper, was commissioned to execute a bronze for $7,000, and funds were raised across the nation. While planning for the Centennial was underway, the legislature passed an equal-suffrage measure to be submitted to voters the following year, and the president of the Exposition invited N.A.W.S.A. to hold its annual convention in Portland. Thus, the summer of 1905 witnessed a remarkable confluence of events. The Exposition opened on June 1, and the women’s convention was gavel…

OREGON FEDERATION OF WOMEN’S CLUBS – circa May-June, 1905
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-16T22:11:14Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: Little is known about this manuscript, which was found in folder “Suffrage Correspondence 1905-1906″ in the Abigail Scott Duniway Papers. Textual clues strongly suggest a meeting of the Oregon Federation of Women’s Clubs in Portland, with Scott Duniway speaking as a Federation representative (in her home city, of course). If so, its probable date is […]
encoded: Little is known about this manuscript, which was found in folder “Suffrage Correspondence 1905-1906″ in the Abigail Scott Duniway Papers. Textual clues strongly suggest a meeting of the Oregon Federation of Women’s Clubs in Portland, with Scott Duniway speaking as a Federation representative (in her home city, of course). If so, its probable date is 1905.1 Madam President: In responding to our masterly welcome, to which we have just listened, and in appreciative acknowledgment of the honor that accrues to me, on behalf of the Oregon Federation of Women’s Clubs, I am peculiarly impressed with the deep significance of this important gathering. How vividly I recall the time, 30 years ago, when, of the many silver haired women now present, few if any imagined that the time would ever come when any other Oregon woman save only my fool-hardy self, would ever be guilty of such a supposed-to-be-unwomanly act as to assist in forming, much less to address a public assembly of this character. Still less did you imagine that the 20th Century would find you convened from all over the state, in a sort of handicapped, semi-official Legislative capacity, to consider the ways and means necessary to accomplish the betterment of humanity’s conditions, temporal, civic and economic. Thirty years ago, when many of these blooming delegates had scarcely passed their babyhood, and many others had not yet been born, your humble speaker braved the odium of public opinion and the misrepresentation of ignorance and prejudice alone, in behalf of just such work as now convenes us. But she did not dream that she would live to see her own adopted state regard it as an honor for women to appear upon any platform in any other capacity than that of singer or actress; still less did she imagine that, were such an assemblage of women possible, she would ever be chosen as one of its honored spokeswomen. But the world moves and women are moving with it. The church has learned, much to its credit and advan…

“PRESIDENTS PAST AND FUTURE” – circa Fall, 1903
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-16T22:10:26Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: Encouraged by the presence of prominent Olympia, Washington, clubwoman (and Scott Duniway’s close friend), Abigail Howard Hunt Stuart, the Portland Woman’s Club was organized on December 19, 1895. A temporary organizing committee was appointed, including as president Georgiana M. Burton Lewis, wife of Oregonian owner and paper-making industrialist Henry Lewis Pittock. However, to Jane C. […]
encoded: Encouraged by the presence of prominent Olympia, Washington, clubwoman (and Scott Duniway’s close friend), Abigail Howard Hunt Stuart, the Portland Woman’s Club was organized on December 19, 1895. A temporary organizing committee was appointed, including as president Georgiana M. Burton Lewis, wife of Oregonian owner and paper-making industrialist Henry Lewis Pittock. However, to Jane C. Jackson Card would fall the honor of serving the first full term as president of the newly-established club. With at least seventy-eight charter members, the Portland club quickly became the largest in the state, and the third to affiliate with the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (in 1896). It offered departments of American literature, English literature, French, German, music, home, and education; later, departments of Shakespeare, philanthropy, library, parliamentary law, and art would form.<a href="https://asduniway.org/%e2%80%9cpresidents-past-and-future%e2%80%9d-circa-july-1903/#footnote_1_81" id="identifier_1_81" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="First Annual Report; Writer’s Project; Croly 1017-18. Abigail, her daughter, Clara Belle Duniway Stearns, and daughter-in-law, Cora Parsons Duniway, were charter members (Writer’s Project). Because she was identified so closely with the suffrage cause, Abigail declined to host the initial organizational meeting at her home, or even to attend. She admitted that her relationships with antisuffragist club women, even those she considered personal friends, often remained prickly (A. Duniway, Path Breaking 213-14; “Greeting and Reminiscence”).">1 In June, 1902, much to her astonishment, Scott Duniway was elected the club’s seventh president.<a href="https://asduniway.org/%e2%80%9cpresidents-past-and-future%e2%80%9d-circa-july-1903/#footnote_2_81" id="identifier_2_81" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="She “could not have been more astonished at this election than if I had been suddenly appointed …

“A PIONEER INCIDENT” – December 20, 1902
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-16T21:36:51Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: Scott Duniway addressed the fourth annual meeting of the Oregon Historical Society on this Saturday at City Hall. The topic of discussion was the Constitutional Convention of 1857, and speaker after distinguished speaker arose to eulogize the framers as “men in whose veins flowed firm purpose, highmindedness and enduring sagacity.”1 Their message, sometimes implicit and […]
encoded: Scott Duniway addressed the fourth annual meeting of the Oregon Historical Society on this Saturday at City Hall. The topic of discussion was the Constitutional Convention of 1857, and speaker after distinguished speaker arose to eulogize the framers as “men in whose veins flowed firm purpose, highmindedness and enduring sagacity.”<a href="https://asduniway.org/%e2%80%9ca-pioneer-incident%e2%80%9d-december-20-1902/#footnote_1_79" id="identifier_1_79" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="These speakers included: John R. McBride (1832-1904), state legislator, Congressman, and chief justice of Idaho territory; Reuben Patrick Boise (1819-1907), justice of territorial supreme court, chief justice of state Supreme Court, and circuit judge of 3rd district; George Henry Williams (1823-1910), chief justice of territorial supreme court, U.S. Senator, U.S. Attorney General, and, at the time, mayor of Portland; Theodore Thurston Geer (1851-1924), state legislator, speaker of Oregon House, and, at the time, Governor (the first native Oregonian elected to this office); and W. D. Fenton, the newly elected vice-president of the society who chaired the proceedings. To an extent, framer after framer eulogized himself: McBride, Boise, and Williams were one-third of the surviving delegates of the constitutional convention (Sunday Oregonian 21 Dec. 1902; Corning 31, 97-98, 159, 269).">1 Their message, sometimes implicit and often explicit, was that the Constitution could not be improved upon and ought not be tampered with. Into this torrent of sentiment steps Scott Duniway to note the imperfections in this supposedly sacrosanct document and thereby to swim firmly against the tide. Following speeches that have recounted the deeds of pioneer lawmakers, she seeks to alter the record by reminding her audience of the contributions of pioneer women. She praises the pioneers of both sexes who “raise the standard of Liberty for all the people to higher planes” but protests the …

“EMINENT WOMEN I HAVE MET” – June 1, 1900
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-16T21:24:19Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: Although more broadly an outgrowth of the religious and moral awakenings of the first half of the nineteenth century, including the abolitionist and woman’s rights movements, the origin of the woman’s club movement traditionally is given as March, 1868: When columnist Jennie June was denied a ticket to a New York Press Club dinner feting Charles Dickens...
encoded: Although more broadly an outgrowth of the religious and moral awakenings of the first half of the nineteenth century, including the abolitionist and woman’s rights movements, the origin of the woman’s club movement traditionally is given as March, 1868: When columnist Jennie June was denied a ticket to a New York Press Club dinner feting Charles Dickens, she and four friends resolved to organize “a club composed of women only, that should manage its own affairs, represent as far as possible the active interests of women, and create a bond of fellowship between them, which many women, as well as men, thought at that time it would be impossible to establish.” Thus was founded Sorosis.<a href="https://asduniway.org/%e2%80%9ceminent-women-i-have-met%e2%80%9d-june-1-1900/#footnote_1_76" id="identifier_1_76" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="Croly 15-16. In its immediate exigence–exclusion from the public (which is to say, men’s) sphere–the club movement thus parallels the woman suffrage movement, which had been provoked by the exclusion of female delegates at the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840.">1 The movement spread far and wide, by the end of the century representing a real social, civic and political force. Although the clubs’ stated purposes were varied (and evolving), including study (of literary and other topics), philanthropy, reform, and improved conditions for women and children, their underlying purposes were to give women an avenue to public life and, especially in the West, to offset economic development imperatives by making cultural and social concerns a part of community priorities.<a href="https://asduniway.org/%e2%80%9ceminent-women-i-have-met%e2%80%9d-june-1-1900/#footnote_2_76" id="identifier_2_76" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="Haarsager 3-4; Blair, Clubwoman. In its account of the third meeting of the infant Portland Woman’s Club, the Pacific Empire–which actively catered to woman’s clubbers–testifi…

“SUCCESS IN SIGHT” – February 12, 1900
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-16T20:13:42Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: The following year, and four months before Oregon men would vote on an equal suffrage amendment, the N.A.W.S.A. and Scott Duniway both returned to Washington, D.C. As might be expected under these circumstances, Abigail here reports on progress in Oregon and the prospects for success in June. She describes the behind-the-scenes campaign being waged, a […]
encoded: The following year, and four months before Oregon men would vote on an equal suffrage amendment, the N.A.W.S.A. and Scott Duniway both returned to Washington, D.C. As might be expected under these circumstances, Abigail here reports on progress in Oregon and the prospects for success in June. She describes the behind-the-scenes campaign being waged, a “hunt” so “still” that she refuses to reveal the identities of its male supporters. Interestingly, Scott Duniway does not discuss the upcoming election until quite late. The first three-quarters of her address is a narrative of woman’s progress that strikes several familiar themes. It reiterates that the Pacific Northwest is a special region with a unique destiny, in which equal rights for women can flourish. It celebrates the inevitable advance of progress, including the progressive enlightenment that equal rights portend. And it argues, in particularly clear terms, that the pioneer women of the region have earned these rights. While these themes arguably appealed to the nobler instincts of (i.e., flattered) her regional audiences, they well may have struck Eastern audiences as provincial, even insulting. Possibly sensing this problem, Abigail modifies her treatment here by reinterpreting “progress.” She analyzes women’s changing fortunes in marriage and work in the modern era, changes wrought by the industrialization and urbanization of the late nineteenth century (and changes with which Eastern audiences could identify, perhaps even more than Western ones). In a world “out of joint,” she argues, the shopworn rationales for woman’s sphere no longer fit reality. This also was a time of change for N.A.W.S.A.. This convention would be Susan B. Anthony’s last as president, and she would celebrate her eightieth birthday the day after it adjourned; a pragmatically-minded younger generation, notably Carrie Lane Chapman Catt, who would succeed Anthony as president, and Anna Howard Shaw, increasingly would determine the organ…

“HOW TO WIN THE BALLOT” – May 2, 1899
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-16T19:57:41Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: Regarding political–and rhetorical–strategy, Scott Duniway often disagreed bitterly with other suffrage leaders, particularly Eastern women officers of the national suffrage organizations. Because the Pacific Northwest was a special place (a theme invoked again here), she believed, special strategies or persuasive appeals were required. In particular, Scott Duniway generally resisted expediency-based rationales for suffrage in favor […]
encoded: Regarding political–and rhetorical–strategy, Scott Duniway often disagreed bitterly with other suffrage leaders, particularly Eastern women officers of the national suffrage organizations. Because the Pacific Northwest was a special place (a theme invoked again here), she believed, special strategies or persuasive appeals were required. In particular, Scott Duniway generally resisted expediency-based rationales for suffrage in favor of arguments from principle. Justifying the right to vote by predicting what women would do once enfranchised, she argued, would only threaten men and make suffrage unattainable. Instead, she claimed, woman suffrage must be justified on the same grounds that men believe their own suffrage is justified, i.e., as a right. Although a life-long temperance advocate, Scott Duniway feared most the influence of overzealous prohibitionists. She was convinced that men would refuse to grant women the right to vote for fear of losing their right to drink. Throughout her career, she attempted to keep these two issues separate in the public mind, enduring repeated, acrimonious, and unfair charges that she had “sold out” to liquor interests.1 “How to Win the Ballot” is Scott Duniway’s most thorough defense of argument from principle and her most explicit statement of the rhetorical assumptions that guided her persuasive efforts: She analyzes the suffragists’ audience–men–and posits both appropriate and inappropriate appeals with which to convince this audience, including the strategic importance of humor. On the penultimate evening of the National American Woman Suffrage Association convention, meeting in the “handsome” St. Cecilia Club House in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and following a Dvorak piano solo “brilliantly rendered” by Miss Elenora Bushnell, Susan B. Anthony introduced her long-time friend and co-worker. Abigail strode to the lectern, politely but firmly to rebuke a segment of “the National’s” leadership and methods.<a href="https://asduniway.…

“WOMAN IN OREGON HISTORY” – February 14, 1899
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-16T18:56:35Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: Scott Duniway delivered this address on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of Oregon’s admission to statehood. Commemorative ceremonies were conducted by the state legislature in joint session in the statehouse in Salem. According to a front page report in the next day’s edition of the Morning Oregonian, roughly 1,200 officials, pioneers, prominent citizens, and […]
encoded: Scott Duniway delivered this address on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of Oregon’s admission to statehood. Commemorative ceremonies were conducted by the state legislature in joint session in the statehouse in Salem. According to a front page report in the next day’s edition of the Morning Oregonian, roughly 1,200 officials, pioneers, prominent citizens, and members of the general public crowded into the legislative chambers, under threatening skies, to listen to the day’s speeches and music. Scott Duniway, who was one of five speakers on the program, and the only woman, addressed the assembly that afternoon on the invited topic about which she, better than anyone, could speak personally: the contributions of women to Oregon’s development. The official legislative record of the day’s proceedings said of her, revealingly if a little hyperbolically: “Mrs. Abigail Scott Duniway is known throughout the nation as perhaps the ablest champion now living of the claims of woman for equal political rights. Her voice and pen have been always eloquent and powerful in any cause in which they were engaged, and many a foe has keenly regretted having called forth her batteries of reasoning, ridicule and retributive castigation. Mrs. Duniway is a noble woman, of whom Oregon is justly proud.”1 In this ceremonial context, Scott Duniway delivered a fitting epideictic address. In especially eloquent fashion, she develops her oft-repeated theme in praise of the Pacific Northwest as the unique scene of liberty and progress. She praises both the men and the women of this region, whose interests, she argues, always have been mutual and interdependent. Above all, she presents an encomium to the heroism of pioneer women. Once again, this epideictic form serves an underlying deliberative purpose, i.e., to demonstrate that Oregon women, having survived hardships equal to or greater than those endured by men, have earned equal political rights. And once again, Scott Duniway’s own life …

OREGON STATE EQUAL SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION – November 20, 1897
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-16T18:15:58Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: This address was delivered at the twenty-sixth annual convention of the O.S.E.S.A.. Meeting in her home at 294 Clay Street in Portland, Scott Duniway, as President, speaks personally and autobiographically while striking many familiar themes. She is optimistic about the progress of the movement. She asserts that the best people and the honorable classes all […]
encoded: This address was delivered at the twenty-sixth annual convention of the O.S.E.S.A.. Meeting in her home at 294 Clay Street in Portland, Scott Duniway, as President, speaks personally and autobiographically while striking many familiar themes. She is optimistic about the progress of the movement. She asserts that the best people and the honorable classes all support equal suffrage, and only the ignorant and the vicious oppose it. She emphatically endorses principled rather than expedient rationales for woman’s enfranchisement. And she reiterates the need for quiet, “still hunt” campaign tactics, a strategy endorsed by her executive committee days earlier.<a href="https://asduniway.org/oregon-state-equal-suffrage-association-november-20-1897/#footnote_1_66" id="identifier_1_66" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="On November 11, the Pacific Empire reported the committee’s decision “to defer all aggressive campaign work until the present legislature, or its successors, shall meet and ratify the equal suffrage amendment as proposed by the last legislative assembly. It was also voted to keep up the present effective method of quiet agitation along all lines of woman’s effort, social, political, religious, educational, philanthropic and literary, as the best and only practical [method] to popularize the movement in all the walks of life” (6).">1 The text is taken from a typescript in Scrapbook #1 in the Abigail Scott Duniway Papers.2 To The Oregon State Equal Suffrage Association in 26th Annual Convention Assembled, Greeting, Members, Delegates, Friends: When our work for securing the equal rights of women began in the Pacific Northwest in 1871, every woman was required by law to bury her entire individuality, including even her right to retain her own name, to hold property, to sue and be sued, to own her own wardrobe and earnings, and the right to the custody of her own children, at the foot of the marriage altar. If her husband proved capable financia…

“WOMAN IN JOURNALISM” – circa February-October, 1897
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-16T17:38:21Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: In this address, Scott Duniway discusses her principal trade–journalism–and the contributions of women thereto.1 As she relates in closing, this was to have been a “practical” discussion of journalism as an occupation for women but, instead, her introductory remarks cataloging well-known women journalists expanded to fill her time. As a result, the speech is interesting […]
encoded: In this address, Scott Duniway discusses her principal trade–journalism–and the contributions of women thereto.1 As she relates in closing, this was to have been a “practical” discussion of journalism as an occupation for women but, instead, her introductory remarks cataloging well-known women journalists expanded to fill her time. As a result, the speech is interesting primarily for historical reasons. In part, the address is typically autobiographical. We learn something of the women who influenced Scott Duniway’s own career as a newspaperwoman, e.g., that the first woman’s paper to make her acquaintance was Amelia Jenks Bloomer’s Lily. She also discusses many others, some famous, some not, including Susan B. Anthony’s and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Revolution, and Lucy Stone’s Woman’s Journal. Often her descriptions are purely factual; evaluations, when offered, are uniformly praiseworthy. Thus, the speech also assumes an epideictic edge. Her lengthy catalogue (“absurdly incomplete” as it may be<a href="https://asduniway.org/%e2%80%9cwoman-in-journalism%e2%80%9d-circa-february-september-1897/#footnote_2_64" id="identifier_2_64" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="By 1886, approximately five hundred women were estimated to be working in some editorial capacity on American newspapers (Karolevitz 176-77). So Abigail’s catalogue eleven years later, lengthy as it is in mentioning some sixty-five women journalists, only scratched the surface. Notable omissions include Mary Ann Shadd Cary (1823-1893), African-American from Delaware who helped found and edit the Provincial Freeman in Ontario, Canada, in the mid-1850s (E. Lewis), and Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm (1815-1884), who edited and published a series of newspapers, first in Pittsburgh and then in St. Cloud, Minnesota (Tyler, “Swisshelm”; Ashley, 1690-1872 430-35; Endres, “Pittsburgh”).">2) is an important testament to women’s contributions to journalism, and is further (perhaps unintentional) proof o…

OREGON STATE EQUAL SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION – December 10, 1896
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-16T16:52:59Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: The twenty-fifth annual meeting of O.S.E.S.A.1 convened at the Unitarian church in Portland on this rainy Thursday afternoon. In her capacity as the organization’s President, Scott Duniway delivered the following annual address, recounting the progress of the suffrage movement not only in Oregon, but nationwide. Her tone is optimistic; asserting gains in public opinion, she […]
encoded: The twenty-fifth annual meeting of O.S.E.S.A.1 convened at the Unitarian church in Portland on this rainy Thursday afternoon. In her capacity as the organization’s President, Scott Duniway delivered the following annual address, recounting the progress of the suffrage movement not only in Oregon, but nationwide. Her tone is optimistic; asserting gains in public opinion, she expresses confidence in the future, while her attacks on prohibitionists are comparatively muted. She does argue that only ten percent of suffragists actually believe prohibition to be a temperance measure, and repeats the charge (also made in her address before the Idaho Constitutional Convention) that it was the woman’s rights alliance with prohibition that caused Washington voters to disenfranchise women in 1887. In addition, the recent defeat of a suffrage referendum in California provides her with compelling evidence of the danger of a suffrage-prohibition alliance. Scott Duniway also voices her own unique perspective on national issues of the day, in particular the financial crises that spawned the calls for “free silver” and an end to the gold standard, and culminated in the famous, and just-concluded, Presidential contest pitting the “Great Commoner,” Democrat William Jennings Bryan (also endorsed by the Populist, Silver Republican, and National Silver Parties), against Republican William McKinley. Near the end of her speech, Scott Duniway rejects both mono- and bi-metallism; in an interesting and atypical argument from expediency, she claims that women are better economists than men and, once freed, will cure the cause of the panic by raising the funds to pay the national debt. The text is taken from the December 10, 1896, issue of the Pacific Empire.2 With the return of the usual anniversary season for most of the State Equal Suffrage Organizations that hold themselves auxiliary to the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Oregon wheels into line with a better equipped service, …

“The manifold duties of the mother . . .” – circa 1894-1896
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-15T23:23:32Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: Very little is known about this untitled and undated text, in which Scott Duniway argues that domestic service must be made a respectable occupation. Her discussion is particularly interesting for three reasons. First, in her view, the topic of domestic service is important not only to the wealthy and privileged, for whom she has little […]
encoded: Very little is known about this untitled and undated text, in which Scott Duniway argues that domestic service must be made a respectable occupation. Her discussion is particularly interesting for three reasons. First, in her view, the topic of domestic service is important not only to the wealthy and privileged, for whom she has little time, but for families everywhere, and families of working women in particular. Abigail herself had hired a Chinese cook and a housekeeper when the family moved to Portland in 1871, just as she was launching the New Northwest, and knew that she could lead a public life because she had domestic help.<a href="https://asduniway.org/%e2%80%9cthe-manifold-duties-of-the-mother-%e2%80%9d-circa-1894-1896/#footnote_1_60" id="identifier_1_60" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="“Abigail Scott Duniway” 9; I. Ross, Ladies 193. Even earlier, while they lived in Albany, Abigail could manage as well as she did in part because, after the 1862 accident in which a runaway team of horses dragged a wagon over his back, rendering him a semi-invalid for life, Ben was home taking care of the youngest boys, Clyde and Ralph (born there in 1866 and 1869, respectively) (Moynihan, Rebel 76; D. Duniway 203-04).">1 Indeed, the New Northwest once praised Oregon as a place “where cooking and washing and chambermaid work are performed by Chinamen and women can engage in lucrative employment unlike women in older states.”<a href="https://asduniway.org/%e2%80%9cthe-manifold-duties-of-the-mother-%e2%80%9d-circa-1894-1896/#footnote_2_60" id="identifier_2_60" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="Qtd. in Capell 45. Scott Duniway’s attitude toward the Chinese was somewhat more complicated than might be suggested by her frequent condemnation of the consignment of women to “the political category of idiots, insane persons, criminals and Chinamen,” or by her more general criticism of foreign-born voters. She believed that Chinese servants en…

NATIONAL AMERICAN WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION CONVENTION – circa January 31-February 5, 1895
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-15T23:17:42Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: In 1895 Scott Duniway traveled all the way to Atlanta for the first N.A.W.S.A. convention held in the South, or outside Washington, D.C. The History of Woman Suffrage reported that the following speech provoked “much laughter.”1 This one-paragraph synopsis, remarkably, is the most complete account of a Scott Duniway speech in the entire, six-volume History, […]
encoded: In 1895 Scott Duniway traveled all the way to Atlanta for the first N.A.W.S.A. convention held in the South, or outside Washington, D.C. The History of Woman Suffrage reported that the following speech provoked “much laughter.”1 This one-paragraph synopsis, remarkably, is the most complete account of a Scott Duniway speech in the entire, six-volume History, which ignores other, far more important–and far more controversial–efforts. That so key a record would so slight so important an advocate of woman suffrage in the West speaks volumes about its biases and limitations. There are in Oregon three classes of women opposed to suffrage. 1. Women who are so overworked that they have no time to think of it. They are joined to their wash-tubs; let them alone. But the children of these overworked women are coming on. 2. Women who have usurped all the rights in the matrimonial category, their husbands’ as well as their own. The husbands of such women are always loudly opposed to suffrage. The “sassiest” man in any community is the hen-pecked husband away from home. 3. Young girls matrimonially inclined, who fear the avowal of a belief in suffrage would injure their chances. I can assure such girls that a woman who wishes to vote gets more offers than one who does not. Their motto should be “Liberty first, and union afterwards.” The man whose wife is a clinging vine is apt to be like the oaks in the forest that are found wrapped in vines–dead at the top. NOTES 4: 249.

“THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST” – June 1, 1893
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-15T23:10:45Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: This address is an excellent example of Scott Duniway’s praise of the land, people, and opportunities of the Pacific Northwest. The Congress of Women at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago1 was a fitting occasion for such a unifying address: Scott Duniway uses the quatercentennial of Columbus’ pioneering voyage to relate the pioneer story of […]
encoded: This address is an excellent example of Scott Duniway’s praise of the land, people, and opportunities of the Pacific Northwest. The Congress of Women at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago<a href="https://asduniway.org/%e2%80%9cthe-pacific-northwest%e2%80%9d-june-1-1893/#footnote_1_56" id="identifier_1_56" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="A world’s fair, opening January 22, 1893, held in celebration of the four-hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ voyage, attended by more than 21.4 million visitors. A series of congresses were convened under the auspices of the woman’s branch of the World’s Congress Auxiliary, including a Women’s Congress and a Suffrage Congress, over a six-month period (History of Woman Suffrage 4: 217). The best documented of these was the first, the World’s Congress of Representative Women of All Lands, held May 15-21, in which 528 delegates representing 27 countries and 126 organizations participated. Described as “the greatest assemblage of women which ever had been held, ” its published proceedings ran to nearly one thousand pages (Sewall), and it was remarked in History of Woman Suffrage (4: 609-10). Some women spoke at more than one congress; for example, Sarah Brown Ingersoll Cooper gave thirty-six addresses during the course of the exposition (Eagle 296). Also, the label “Congress of Women” seems to have been adopted generically to refer to all. Thus, pinpointing the congress at which Scott Duniway delivered this address is difficult. Her dating of her speech rules out the Congress of Representative Women, and she appears nowhere in its proceedings. Her speech is excerpted in a second publication (Eagle). Only sixteen women (out of hundreds) are reported in both publications, and in fewer than half of these cases are similar speeches reproduced, so the latter appears to be a wider-ranging compendium of selected speeches from the different congresses.">1 was a fitting occasion for such a unifying addre…

“WOMAN SUFFRAGE AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY” – circa 1892
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-15T22:03:24Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: The following speech, the primary purpose of which was to rally Republican support for women’s voting rights, was delivered to a number of equal suffrage societies during the 1892 Presidential election campaign. Historian Samuel Eliot Morison once observed: “In 1890 American politics lost their equilibrium and began to pitch and toss in an effort to […]
encoded: The following speech, the primary purpose of which was to rally Republican support for women’s voting rights, was delivered to a number of equal suffrage societies during the 1892 Presidential election campaign. Historian Samuel Eliot Morison once observed: “In 1890 American politics lost their equilibrium and began to pitch and toss in an effort to reach stability among wild currents of protest that issued from the caverns of discontent.”1 For two decades, factory workers had been organizing in groups like the Knights of Labor and, later, Samuel Gompers’ American Federation of Labor, and striking for decent working conditions. But their gains were sporadic and their struggle against wealthy, often well-armed, capitalists and an unsympathetic judiciary given to ruling against labor on Spencerian, social darwinist grounds remained bitter and intractable. Meanwhile, as Kansan Mary Elizabeth Clyens Lease exhorted them to “raise less corn and more hell,” destitute farmers, victims of both drought and monopolists, turned their fraternal and economic alliances to politics and revolt. In 1892, these forces gave birth to the People’s, or Populist, Party, whose platform demanded reforms including: free and unlimited coinage of silver; government ownership of railroads, telephones and telegraphs; a graduated income tax; an eight-hour work day; popular election of U.S. Senators; and initiative and referendum. Thus, while the principals in the 1892 Presidential election were Republican Benjamin Harrison and Democrat Grover Cleveland, the contest also featured two minor party candidates: General John Bidwell of California, of the Prohibition Party; and General James B. Weaver, a former Greenbacker from Iowa, of the new Populist Party.2 Scott Duniway approached this election with mixed emotions. On one hand, her antipathy toward the Prohibitionists reinforced a general suspicion of third parties. Six years before, she had blamed Cleveland’s 1884 victory on “the reflex action of t…

“EQUAL RIGHTS FOR ALL” – July 17, 1889
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-15T21:32:55Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: In addition to her efforts in Oregon and Washington, Scott Duniway campaigned vigorously for suffrage in nearby Idaho for many years. By her own account, from 1876 to 1895, she traveled over 12,000 miles “by river, rail, stage, and buckboard,” delivered 140 public lectures in at least twenty-two cities and towns, addressed the territorial legislature […]
encoded: In addition to her efforts in Oregon and Washington, Scott Duniway campaigned vigorously for suffrage in nearby Idaho for many years. By her own account, from 1876 to 1895, she traveled over 12,000 miles “by river, rail, stage, and buckboard,” delivered 140 public lectures in at least twenty-two cities and towns, addressed the territorial legislature in 1887, wrote hundreds of columns of correspondence and canvassed the territory “on foot from house to house” for the New Northwest. Indeed, for a time the family owned a ranch in the Lost River Valley.<a href="https://asduniway.org/%e2%80%9cequal-rights-for-all%e2%80%9d-july-17-1889/#footnote_1_52" id="identifier_1_52" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="In the spring of 1886, while on a lecture tour of southern Idaho, Abigail and Willis filed claims on two large tracts of land near the villages of Hailey and Antelope Station. Their motives were largely speculative: They hoped that irrigation schemes and a proposed railroad route, to which Harvey Scott had tipped them, would pay off. Wearied by political brawling and Clara’s death, and perhaps envisioning a chance to make her cooperative economic ideals a reality, Abigail was persuaded to sell the New Northwest. In July, Ben, who missed his ranching days, and sons moved to Idaho while she remained in Portland to finish out the paper’s last year of publication. She spent two weeks in Idaho in January, 1887, but quickly returned to the warmth of her Clay Street house. Thereafter she visited only during summers. Her hopes for the Idaho properties never materialized and by the spring of 1892 she offered them for sale (Moynihan, Rebel 162-63, 187, 189-90; cf. L. Johnson 514; Kessler, “Siege of the Citadels: Search” 145; Richey, “Hard Scrabble” 92).">1 The following address was delivered before the Idaho Constitutional Convention, meeting in Boise. It was made, in part, in response to lobbying by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union for a prohibition rid…

U.S. SENATE SELECT COMMITTEE ON WOMAN SUFFRAGE – January 24, 1889
type: item
creator: Randall A. Lake
date: 2010-11-16T04:00:00Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: The morning after she had admonished her sisters in “Ballots and Bullets,” Scott Duniway accompanied eight other representatives of the N.W.S.A1 to Capitol Hill, to testify once again before the Senate Committee on Woman Suffrage. The text is taken from the official committee report.2 Gentlemen of the committee, I had thought to offer a little […]
encoded: The morning after she had admonished her sisters in “Ballots and Bullets,” Scott Duniway accompanied eight other representatives of the N.W.S.A1 to Capitol Hill, to testify once again before the Senate Committee on Woman Suffrage. The text is taken from the official committee report.2 Gentlemen of the committee, I had thought to offer a little apology for the seeming temerity of my coming before you on such an occasion, presumably to instruct you in the law, but I am happy to state that the able paper read by our delegate from Missouri (Mrs. Minor)<a href="https://asduniway.org/u-s-senate-committee-on-woman-suffrage-january-24-1889/#footnote_3_4270" id="identifier_3_4270" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="Virginia Louisa Minor (1824-1894): born Caroline County, Virginia; daughter of Warner and Maria (Timberlake) Minor; moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, when 2; little known of childhood and education; married distant cousin, attorney Francis Minor, 1843; after year in Mississippi, settled in St. Louis, 1844; only child, Francis Gilmer, born 1852, died at 14 in shooting accident; despite Virginia roots, during Civil War joined St. Louis Ladies Union Aid Society, later principle auxiliary of Western Sanitary Commission; first Missouri woman to take public stand for suffrage; petitioned state legislature, 1867; when rejected, 89-5, organized Woman Suffrage Association of Missouri, 1867; first president, re-elected annually for five years; resigned presidency 1871, when W.S.A.M. affiliated with American Woman Suffrage Association, because she personally allied with National Woman Suffrage Association; first president of St. Louis branch, N.W.S.A, organized 1879; after unification, 1890, president of new state branch of N.A.W.S.A. until 1892, when ill health compelled retirement; in speeches and pamphlets, argued that newly-passed 14th Amendment gave women the right to vote, 1869; attempted to register to vote in St. Louis, 1872; when registrar Reese…

“BALLOTS AND BULLETS” – January 23, 1889
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-15T18:44:23Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: The controversy that was to preoccupy Scott Duniway for many years and define her place within the suffrage movement concerned prohibition, which was one of a number of reform-oriented movements to gain favor during the last half of the nineteenth century. Joseph Gusfield attributes the rise in anti-liquor sentiment in part to the influx of […]
encoded: The controversy that was to preoccupy Scott Duniway for many years and define her place within the suffrage movement concerned prohibition, which was one of a number of reform-oriented movements to gain favor during the last half of the nineteenth century. Joseph Gusfield attributes the rise in anti-liquor sentiment in part to the influx of European immigrants; temperance was a “status issue” for those seeking to curb “undesirable” behaviors among the “lower classes.” Many eastern suffrage leaders, of older stock and from the large cities with heavy concentrations of new arrivals, came to embrace prohibition as well, as part of a gradual shift from principled arguments for suffrage to expediency-based rationales. As justifications grounded in natural rights (i.e., in the ways in which men and women were fundamentally the same as human beings) slowly were supplanted by justifications grounded in women’s moral superiority (i.e., in the ways in which men and women were fundamentally different in character), prohibition became the paradigmatic example of what women would do with the vote. Because she did not drink and openly resented the fact that men of the “lower classes” were enfranchised when women were not, it may seem surprising that Scott Duniway did not embrace the political marriage of prohibition and suffrage. But, save for a brief period early in her adult life, she did not.<a href="https://asduniway.org/%e2%80%9cballots-and-bullets%e2%80%9d-circa-january-21-23-1889/#footnote_1_50" id="identifier_1_50" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="Moynihan sheds some light on the family background that may have contributed to Scott Duniway’s opinions. Although Grandfather Roelofson had been a teetotaler since his religious conversion in 1795, the Scotts were “moral suasionists rather than prohibitionists,” and the Sons of Temperance, to which Tucker Scott belonged, was “frequently denounced by cold-water Yankees” (ardent New England temperance advocat…

VANCOUVER, WASHINGTON TERRITORY – July 4, 1885
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-16T02:25:59Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: The year following their 1884 defeat at the polls1, Oregon suffragists were invited by their sisters to the north, who had won their own right to vote scarcely twenty months before, to an unusual Independence Day celebration, described as “the first equal rights celebration since the nation’s birth.” The “good citizens of Vancouver . . […]
encoded: The year following their 1884 defeat at the polls<a href="https://asduniway.org/vancouver-washington-territory-july-4-1885/#footnote_1_48" id="identifier_1_48" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="Scott Duniway was not chastened or discouraged into idleness in this year. In the three months following the June defeat, she traveled 1,500 miles, gave forty-three public lectures, complained about inadequate financial support, and implored others to enter the field: “Where are the philanthropists who will shoulder this load and help the women on to victory by putting workers in the field at living wages? . . . There is work, and plenty of it, awaiting every woman who can make a speech. . . . Some of you are not slow to criticize your humble servant for not having done more effective duty. What are you doing yourselves?” (New Northwest 18 Sept. 1884)">1, Oregon suffragists were invited by their sisters to the north, who had won their own right to vote scarcely twenty months before, to an unusual Independence Day celebration, described as “the first equal rights celebration since the nation’s birth.” The “good citizens of Vancouver . . . magnanimously tendered the free use of their city park” for the occasion. Apparently, some were more magnanimous than others because, “when it was known among certain elements that the celebration was to be one of absolute equality between men and the newly enfranchised people of the commonwealth, certain local societies refused to parade or otherwise participate in the festivities.” These elements, however, “were neither missed nor needed.” Traveling by steamer from Portland, the celebrants were greeted in Vancouver by the U.S. Fourteenth Infantry Band and paraded to the park in a procession led by “a magnificent ship of state on wheels,” decorated with banners and evergreens, “sails furled and flag floating at the masthead,” carrying ninety-four “beautifully attired boys and girls,” and drawn by six “splendidly matched h…

U.S. SENATE SELECT COMMITTEE ON WOMAN SUFFRAGE – March 7, 1884
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-15T18:24:33Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: Annually since the Civil War, suffragists had petitioned the Congress for voting rights for women, and in this, the nineteenth year of lobbying, Scott Duniway joined the delegation that addressed the Senate in Washington, D.C., the day after the N.W.S.A. convention.1 In a reversal of roles from their 1871 campaign, she was introduced by her […]
encoded: Annually since the Civil War, suffragists had petitioned the Congress for voting rights for women, and in this, the nineteenth year of lobbying, Scott Duniway joined the delegation that addressed the Senate in Washington, D.C., the day after the N.W.S.A. convention.<a href="https://asduniway.org/u-s-senate-select-committee-on-woman-suffrage-march-7-1884/#footnote_1_46" id="identifier_1_46" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="According to a report in the New Northwest, others in the delegation included: Harriette Robinson Shattuck, author and scholar of parliamentary law, from Massachusetts; May Eliza Wright Sewall, educator, clubwoman, and pacifist, of Indiana; Helen Mar Jackson Gougar, temperance reformer, of Indiana; Mary Seymour Howell, lecturer, of New York; Caroline Gilkey Rogers of New York; Elizabeth Boynton Harbert, author and lecturer, of Illinois; Elizabeth Johnson Devereaux Blake of New York; and Susan B. Anthony. This report claims that Scott Duniway spoke seventh (27 Mar. 1884). The New Northwest published speeches by Scott Duniway, Robinson Shattuck and Wright Sewall on April 24, 1884, and by Jackson Gougar and Seymour Howell the following week, May 1. According to the Congressional Record, in which these proceedings were reprinted, also present were Dr. Clemence Sophia Harned Lozier, physician, of New York; and Sarah E. Wall, of Worcester, Massachusetts, who for twenty-five years had protested her status as unrepresented by refusing to pay taxes. This report indicates that Abigail spoke fourth (25 Jan. 1887: 992-96). A third report, in the History of Woman Suffrage, briefly excerpts most of these speeches but ignores Scott Duniway, Harned Lozier, and Wall (4: 36-42). Abigail wrote that she also addressed the House Judiciary Committee the following day, March 8, and the New York state association convention in Albany on March 11-12. History of Woman Suffrage confirms the latter (4: 839), but she is not mentioned in its report of the f…

NATIONAL WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION CONVENTION – March 4, 1884
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-15T18:19:02Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: Although she devoted most of her energies to the cause in the Pacific Northwest, Scott Duniway also maintained a prominent national presence. From the day in 1871 that she invited Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who were on a lecture tour in California, to come to Oregon1, she was a figure to be […]
encoded: Although she devoted most of her energies to the cause in the Pacific Northwest, Scott Duniway also maintained a prominent national presence. From the day in 1871 that she invited Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who were on a lecture tour in California, to come to Oregon1, she was a figure to be reckoned with in the East as well. Regularly she would talk her way across the country to suffrage conventions, where she would apprise the gatherings of the progress of campaigns in her region and lobby for financial and other support.<a href="https://asduniway.org/national-woman-suffrage-association-convention-march-4-1884/#footnote_2_44" id="identifier_2_44" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="The National Woman Suffrage Association convention in New York in May, 1872, had been Scott Duniway’s first (History of Woman Suffrage 2: 516, 4: 773; see also About Scott Duniway n. 19). O.S.W.S.A. and Scott Duniway tended to identify with Anthony’s and Cady Stanton’s New York-based N.W.S.A. more than Lucy Stone’s more conservative, Boston-based American Woman Suffrage Association. However, Abigail plowed both fields. She exchanged papers with the Woman’s Journal, appeared regularly in it, and reprinted its columns in the New Northwest (Moynihan, Rebel 91-92). She attended A.W.S.A. conventions at least twice: 1876, in Philadelphia, and 1885, in Minneapolis, where she also spoke at the Jackson Street Methodist Church and the Minnesota state convention. In Minnesota, as always, she made a strong impression. One local paper called her discussion of women and jury service “just a little suggestive”: “Mrs. Duniway has the faculty of saying some of the brightest things in the most disagreeable manner of any lady in the convention.” At the state convention, she became involved in a “lively little tempest” with W.C.T.U. women (New Northwest 22 Oct. 1885, 29 Oct. 1885; Minneapolis Tribune 15 Oct. 1885, 16 Oct. 1885; St. Paul and Minneapolis Pioneer Press 16 Oc…

OREGON STATE WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION – February 12, 1884
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-12T23:21:59Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: When the O.S.W.S.A.. convened in Turn Halle this Tuesday morning for its twelfth annual meeting, the excitement must have been palpable. For, as President Hattie Loughary1 put it, the circumstances were “peculiarly interesting and encouraging.” Just three months before, the Washington legislature had conferred suffrage upon the women of that territory.2 And just four months […]
encoded: When the O.S.W.S.A.. convened in Turn Halle this Tuesday morning for its twelfth annual meeting, the excitement must have been palpable. For, as President Hattie Loughary<a href="https://asduniway.org/oregon-state-woman-suffrage-association-february-12-1884/#footnote_1_41" id="identifier_1_41" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="Harriet A. Buxton Loughary (1827-1907): prominent Oregon suffragist; born Virginia; married William J. Loughary, teacher, in Burlington, Iowa, 1848; came overland, 1864, settling first in Polk County, then Salem, finally on farm south of Amity, Yamhill County; peripatetic lecturer and campaigner wrote columns for New Northwest, 1874-85; president, O.S.W.S.A. for many years; mother of nine, eight born in Iowa (two died in infancy; six made the overland journey) and one in Oregon; nurse-midwife; regarded a brilliant speaker, Scott Duniway called her “the Patrick Henry of the new dispensation”; died of stroke (K. Holmes 115-17; Moynihan, Rebel 175).">1 put it, the circumstances were “peculiarly interesting and encouraging.” Just three months before, the Washington legislature had conferred suffrage upon the women of that territory.<a href="https://asduniway.org/oregon-state-woman-suffrage-association-february-12-1884/#footnote_2_41" id="identifier_2_41" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="By votes of 14-7 in the house and 7-5 in the council. According to historian T. A. Larson’s demographic analysis of the legislators, victory was not explained by marital status, place of birth, political party affiliation, age, years of residence in the territory, or religion, but by occupation: Farmers supported the bill eleven to two while twenty nonfarmers were evenly divided (“Washington” 52-53).">2 And just four months hence, in June, the voters of Oregon would have an opportunity to do the same. Thus, while Scott Duniway’s reports of progress in the cause were invariably optimistic, perhaps at no other time was this op…

ASTORIA, OREGON – August 9, 1883
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-12T22:26:29Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: In August, 1883, Scott Duniway was in Astoria, campaigning for the suffrage amendment that was to be voted upon in June, 1884, which, she asserted predictably, the “wide-awake, whole-souled and public-spirited” residents favored “with all their hearts.” Abigail wrote an enthusiastic account of the rally. She credited the potent “printer’s ink” of the “gentlemanly editor” […]
encoded: In August, 1883, Scott Duniway was in Astoria, campaigning for the suffrage amendment that was to be voted upon in June, 1884, which, she asserted predictably, the “wide-awake, whole-souled and public-spirited” residents favored “with all their hearts.” Abigail wrote an enthusiastic account of the rally. She credited the potent “printer’s ink” of the “gentlemanly editor” of the Daily Astorian1 with arousing the public, so that the church in which the rally was held, on a Thursday evening, was “crowded to overflowing–crowded till the entrance is blocked and no late comer can get standing room.”2 The rally began with a violin solo by Freeman Parker<a href="https://asduniway.org/astoria-oregon-august-9-1883/#footnote_3_39" id="identifier_3_39" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="Gelo Freeman Parker (1854-?): born in Petaluma, California, where he received a common-school education; worked the family farm until moving to Astoria at 20, where he worked as a mercantile clerk for six years; at the time of this address, surveyor of the city and Clatsop County. Improbably, his father, Freeman Parker (1822-1914): born in Washington, Vermont; became a school teacher, surveyor, and farmer; emigrated to California via Panama during the gold rush, 1849; settled in Petaluma (Gaston, Centennial 3: 466; cf. “Cypress Hill Memorial Park, Petaluma, Sonoma County, CA“). I have not attempted to determine whether the elder Parker, 61 at the time, might or could have been visiting his son or, for that matter, whether he played the violin.">3, “a grand medley of national harmonies, in which the patriotic strains of ‘Hail Columbia’ and ‘Yankee Doodle’ predominate.” So infectious was the music that “[t]he people cannot keep their feet still, and our own Presbyterian toes feel light.”<a href="https://asduniway.org/astoria-oregon-august-9-1883/#footnote_4_39" id="identifier_4_39" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="Abigail was raised in the Cumberland Presbyt…

OREGON STATE WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION – February 13, 1883
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-12T22:17:46Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: Scott Duniway continued as Vice President At Large of O.S.W.S.A. the next year and read the following annual report during the afternoon session of the eleventh annual convention’s first day, meeting in Y.M.C.A. Hall. Obviously feeling unappreciated, she complains–in ways both subtle and not–that she continues to bear the heavy financial burden of her office […]
encoded: Scott Duniway continued as Vice President At Large of O.S.W.S.A. the next year and read the following annual report during the afternoon session of the eleventh annual convention’s first day, meeting in Y.M.C.A. Hall. Obviously feeling unappreciated, she complains–in ways both subtle and not–that she continues to bear the heavy financial burden of her office herself, and calls for establishment of a campaign fund. Once again, the text is taken from minutes published in the New Northwest, February 15, 1883.1 Other copies may be found in Mss. 432B, vol. 16, pp. 33, 35, Oregon Historical Society, and in Scrapbook #2, p. 44, Abigail Scott Duniway Papers. The Daily Oregonian also published the minutes on February 14-16, including this address on the 14th. Minor variations other than capitalization and punctuation are footnoted. In November, 1881, I visited the Washington Territory Legislature, and addressed the honorable body in a joint convention assembled for the purpose of hearing an equal rights argument, in company of a large attendance of spectators, including the Governor<a href="https://asduniway.org/oregon-state-woman-suffrage-association-february-13-1883/#footnote_2_37" id="identifier_2_37" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="William Augustus Newell (1817-1901): born Franklin, Ohio; graduated Rutger’s College, New Jersey; studied medicine at University of Pennsylvania, becoming accomplished surgeon; elected to Congress, 1846, 1848; elected Governor, New Jersey, 1856; returned to Congress, 1864; failed candidate for Governor, 1877; governor, Washington Territory (appointed by Rutherford B. Hayes), 1880-84; woman suffrage first adopted in territory during his term, 1883 (Honeyman; Bancroft, History of Washington 282).">2, the Territorial Secretary<a href="https://asduniway.org/oregon-state-woman-suffrage-association-february-13-1883/#footnote_3_37" id="identifier_3_37" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="Nicholas H. Owings (183…

OREGON PIONEER ASSOCIATION – June 15, 1882
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-12T00:17:18Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: Having migrated to Oregon in 1852 at the age of 17, the people and events of the pioneer period held a special place in Scott Duniway’s heart. She was a member of the Oregon Pioneer Association, founded on October 18, 1873, and a frequent speaker at its annual reunions at the state fairgrounds near Salem.1 […]
encoded: Having migrated to Oregon in 1852 at the age of 17, the people and events of the pioneer period held a special place in Scott Duniway’s heart. She was a member of the Oregon Pioneer Association, founded on October 18, 1873, and a frequent speaker at its annual reunions at the state fairgrounds near Salem.<a href="https://asduniway.org/oregon-pioneer-association-june-15-1882/#footnote_1_35" id="identifier_1_35" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="New Northwest 30 Apr. 1875. The Association’s Transactions first record a Scott Duniway talk in 1877; she appears frequently, as speaker and spoken-of, for the remainder of her life. In 1916, William M. Colvig memorialized her as one of “the mental giants of early Oregon” (Transactions of the Forty-Fourth 346).">1 In mid-June, 1882, she attended the association’s tenth reunion, where, she later recalled, “a goodly crowd was soon assembled to march, with depleted ranks, under the banners of the long ago, to the plaintive strains of the old song, ‘When You and I Were Young,’ appropriately arranged for band music.”2 Scott Duniway was not scheduled to address the crowd this day. However, when the principal speaker for the afternoon fell ill, Scott Duniway read his manuscript for him, “thereby demonstrating,” she noted shrewdly, “the hitherto supposed impossibility that a woman may represent a man.” Following, she was given thirty minutes for original remarks and “vigorously embraced the opportunity for advocating equal rights.” These remarks exemplify the mixture of epideictic and deliberative elements that came to typify Scott Duniway’s persuasive efforts: She argues for a pragmatic, deliberative end–equal suffrage–but largely through transcendent appeals to principle and place that unify, and only secondarily through practical, expedient appeals that divide. So, she claims that Oregon is a special place where liberty and freedom naturally must grow and prosper. She appeals to the pioneer spirit of its inhabit…

OREGON STATE WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION – October 18, 1881
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-12T00:16:45Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: At its ninth convention in February, 1881, O.S.W.S.A. had approved a new constitution that created an office of Vice President at Large, who “shall be authorized to lecture under the auspices of this association, in any town, city or district, he or she may visit, within the boundaries of the state, and shall be vigilant […]
encoded: At its ninth convention in February, 1881, O.S.W.S.A. had approved a new constitution that created an office of Vice President at Large, who “shall be authorized to lecture under the auspices of this association, in any town, city or district, he or she may visit, within the boundaries of the state, and shall be vigilant in prosecuting the work of the association. He or she shall, as far as possible, organize county woman suffrage societies and local woman suffrage clubs, and shall be entitled to such funds from the treasury as the executive committee shall deem appropriate compensation for the service rendered.”1 Abigail had chaired the committee responsible for revising the constitution, so it is not surprising that this new position not only captured her activities perfectly but, more importantly, promised that at least some of her expenses henceforth would be defrayed by the association, not borne out of pocket. One of Abigail’s constant sore spots was about to be salved: She would be compensated (albeit inadequately) for her work. And so, at the opening session of the tenth convention, held at Y.M.C.A. Hall in Portland, Scott Duniway gave the following report of her prodigious activities in the first of her many years as Vice President at Large. Sadly, attendance was “limited, owing no doubt to the rain, which poured down in torrents and continued nearly all the forenoon.” Except for periods when illness “indisposed” her<a href="https://asduniway.org/oregon-state-woman-suffrage-association-october-18-1881/#footnote_2_33" id="identifier_2_33" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="Moynihan chronicles her battles with a variety of conditions from childhood through her later years (Rebel passim). In the New Northwest (22 June 1877), Scott Duniway apologized to readers for “periodic attacks” of illness “every week or two,” which she traced to “periodic overwork” as a child in Illinois, and then slyly claimed were aggravated by the “constant effort on…

OREGON STATE SENATE – October 7, 1880
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-12T00:16:01Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: Like clockwork, Scott Duniway had been presenting petitions for a suffrage law to every session of the Oregon legislature since 18721, ultimately, despite varying degrees of support, to no avail. However, in 1880 prohibitionist legislators introduced both prohibition and woman suffrage amendments to the state constitution, prompting “months of squabbling.”2 Abigail–seeking to decouple the two […]
encoded: Like clockwork, Scott Duniway had been presenting petitions for a suffrage law to every session of the Oregon legislature since 18721, ultimately, despite varying degrees of support, to no avail. However, in 1880 prohibitionist legislators introduced both prohibition and woman suffrage amendments to the state constitution, prompting “months of squabbling.”2 Abigail–seeking to decouple the two issues in the minds of legislators–condemned “undignified” lobbying by temperance forces and refused to allow O.S.W.S.A. participation in the “fanatical nonsense” of a “one-sided ‘temperance ballot.’”3 However, this antipathy did not prevent her from appearing before each house of the legislature to lobby for suffrage alone. On this Thursday evening, at the Capitol in Salem, the Senate took up consideration of S.J.R. 2, “providing that the elective franchise should not hereafter be denied to any citizen on account of sex.”4 Following an “able, logical, comprehensive and unanswerable” opening address by Charles Fulton<a href="https://asduniway.org/oregon-state-senate-october-7-1880/#footnote_5_31" id="identifier_5_31" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="Charles William Fulton (1853-1918): state and U.S. Senator; Republican; born Lima, Ohio; studied law and admitted to Nebraska bar, April, 1875; left for Oregon three days later; taught school at Waterloo (Linn County) until July, when entered law practice in Astoria; elected to state senate, 1878, 1880, 1891, 1893, 1898, 1899, 1901; presiding officer for three sessions; elected by state senate to U.S. Senate, 1903-09; prosecutions of the Mitchell faction for land fraud resulted in defeat in 1908 primaries (Corning 94; Portrait and Biographical Record of the Willamette 90-91; Scott, History of the Oregon Country 1: 346-47).">5 of Clatsop, the resolution’s author, “Mrs. Duniway was invited to address the Senate for twenty minutes; which invitation was accepted.”6 Solomon Hirsch<a href="https://asduniway.org/oregon…

OREGON STATE WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION – February 10, 1880
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-12T00:15:12Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: Once again, Scott Duniway, as President of the O.S.W.S.A., delivered the opening address at the association’s annual convention, meeting this year at her residence in Portland. Once again, her principal theme is advances in the cause of woman’s rights.
encoded: Once again, Scott Duniway, as President of the O.S.W.S.A., delivered the opening address at the association’s annual convention, meeting this year at her residence in Portland. Once again, her principal theme is advances in the cause of woman’s rights. After this convention, Scott Duniway would take an “off year in politics,” at least officially, with Mr. E. F. Heroy succeeding her as President of the association.1 However, she would chair a constitutional revision committee that, in 1881, would create an association office tailor-made for her and that she would occupy for many years: Vice President at Large.2 The text is taken from the New Northwest, February 12, 1880. The Morning Oregonian also published this speech on February 11 and covered subsequent proceedings on the 13th and 14th; minor discrepancies (beyond punctuation and capitalization) between versions are footnoted. Even the latter’s coverage of these events concluded graciously: “The ladies have good cause to congratulate themselves upon the success of this convention. Harmony, dignity and moderation have characterized their discussions, and much latent wisdom is being developed in their mode of meeting the important public questions that naturally come before them for consideration.”3. Alas, it would not always be so. On this, the occasion of the eighth annual and seventh anniversary meeting of this organization, we are convened under more than ordinarily favorable circumstances. A retrospect of seven years ago recalls a doubting, trembling, hoping few of us who met and organized for the purpose of promoting the cause of liberty, while all the rest of the State and city looked on in the spirit of ridicule and opposition. Now our Association numbers among its gentlemen friends and co-workers clergymen, editors, authors, lawyers, physicians, judges, transportation monopolists, bankers, senators, representatives, professors of colleges, State legislators, artists and artisans of every class; while among …

OREGON STATE WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION – February 11, 1879
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-12T00:14:00Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: According to advance billing, the O.S.W.S.A. would convene for the seventh time with President Abigail Scott Duniway in the chair at the YMCA building. Vice-President Hattie Loughary1 would speak on “Rights under the Constitution,” and the Honorable F. O. McCown, Esq.2, of Oregon City, would speak on “Women and the Law.” “Vocal and instrumental music […]
encoded: According to advance billing, the O.S.W.S.A. would convene for the seventh time with President Abigail Scott Duniway in the chair at the YMCA building. Vice-President Hattie Loughary<a href="https://asduniway.org/oregon-state-woman-suffrage-association-february-11-1879/#footnote_1_27" id="identifier_1_27" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="Harriet A. Buxton Loughary (1827-1907): prominent Oregon suffragist; born Virginia; married William J. Loughary, teacher, in Burlington, Iowa, 1848; came overland, 1864, settling first in Polk County, then Salem, finally on farm south of Amity, Yamhill County; peripatetic lecturer and campaigner wrote columns for New Northwest, 1874-85; president, O.S.W.S.A. for many years; mother of nine, eight born in Iowa (two died in infancy; six made the overland journey) and one in Oregon; nurse-midwife; regarded a brilliant speaker, Scott Duniway called her “the Patrick Henry of the new dispensation”; died of stroke (K. Holmes 115-17; Moynihan, Rebel 175).">1 would speak on “Rights under the Constitution,” and the Honorable F. O. McCown, Esq.<a href="https://asduniway.org/oregon-state-woman-suffrage-association-february-11-1879/#footnote_2_27" id="identifier_2_27" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="Ferdinand O. McCown (1839-?): born Kanawha County, Virginia; came to Oregon with his father, 1852; participated in Yakima war; studied at Willamette University and Portland Academy; school teacher, store clerk; read law in San Francisco; admitted to Nevada bar, 1862, then returned to Oregon, opening office at Waconda; enlisted First Oregon Infantry; commissioned second lieutenant; became captain, 1865, commanding Fort Colville and mustering out, December; married Sarah Meldrum, 1865; practiced law in and thrice mayor of Oregon City; seven children (Lang 774-75).">2, of Oregon City, would speak on “Women and the Law.” “Vocal and instrumental music will be a leading feature of the meetings. A general good time …

OREGON STATE WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION – September 25, 1878
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-12T00:11:19Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: In late September, a special meeting of the association took place at Reed’s Opera House in Salem for the purpose of planning for the upcoming legislative session. This brief address was given at the opening of business, on Wednesday. Later, Scott Duniway would complain that these daily business sessions had not been “as largely attended […]
encoded: In late September, a special meeting of the association took place at Reed’s Opera House in Salem for the purpose of planning for the upcoming legislative session. This brief address was given at the opening of business, on Wednesday. Later, Scott Duniway would complain that these daily business sessions had not been “as largely attended as desirable”; however, the “evening exercises” had drawn “crowded houses and aroused enthusiastic interest.” On this day the convention also petitioned the legislature for a joint session, which was not agreed to by the Senate.“Nothing daunted, the ladies, assisted by a half score of gentlemen,” obtained the House’s unanimous approval to meet as a committee of the whole on the following Friday evening, enabling “the President of the Association” also to address it on the subject of “Constitutional Liberty.”1 The text is taken from the New Northwest, October 10, 1878. Once more, my fellow-workers, have the changing seasons brought us to the biennial session of the Oregon legislature, a convocation of men, assembled for the purpose not only of passing laws for the promotion of their benefit, and repealing such as may not suit their interests of the aristocracy of sex, but convened also for the additional purpose, which we declare to be unconstitutional, as well as unjust to us, of continuing to hold that unwarrantable jurisdiction over women which is described in the Declaration of Independence to be “declaring himself invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.” Many of the members of this honorable body of which I speak have outgrown the theory of class or sex legislation. In my associations with them from day to day in the character of correspondent for our journal, I find the old hostility to the idea of woman’s individuality, and right of representation has lost its terrors. Many, even among those who, a half dozen years ago, were bitterly opposed to our freedom, are today our declared allies. Already certai…

OREGON STATE WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION – August 7, 1878
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-12T08:05:37Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: This brief Presidential address was delivered at the opening session of the sixth annual convention, meeting in Astoria. It is interesting, if not remarkable, for its juxtaposition of two basic themes. First, it illustrates Scott Duniway’s recurrent optimism, asserting that conditions have never been more favorable and that ultimate success is inevitable. Second, it reveals, […]
encoded: This brief Presidential address was delivered at the opening session of the sixth annual convention, meeting in Astoria. It is interesting, if not remarkable, for its juxtaposition of two basic themes. First, it illustrates Scott Duniway’s recurrent optimism, asserting that conditions have never been more favorable and that ultimate success is inevitable. Second, it reveals, somewhat obliquely, the practical and organizational impediments to success which Scott Duniway faced, particularly conflict and division within O.S.W.S.A. and a perceived lack of financial support for the New Northwest. The tension between the two themes is unresolved: The second may be taken to give the lie to the first, or the first may seem to mute the seriousness of the second, as if to say “this, too, shall pass.” The text is taken from the proceedings of the convention, published in the New Northwest (August 15, 1878). The object of our meeting, as you are aware, is to so take counsel together that we may be enabled to devise ways and means to carry on the work of woman’s enfranchisement to its complete fulfillment. Never have our prospects been so favorable and the outlook so hopeful as now. Our movement has risen from the ridicule and misrepresentations of former times to a position of acknowledged merit. We are heard in the Senate of the United States, in State legislatures, and in constitutional conventions. There is not a village or hamlet in all America where the voice of our pleading is not respectfully considered. The iron grip of prejudice is fast loosening his hold, and his twin brother, ignorance, will speedily follow in his wake. The present dissatisfaction throughout the nation concerning the existing order of things in the political world shows plainly to the analytical thinker that this government of the United States, which men call a republic, but which is, in reality, an aristocracy of sex, this government of one-half of the people by the other half of the people, is on …

WASHINGTON TERRITORY CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION – June 18, 1878
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-11T23:59:28Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: Meanwhile, back in Washington . . . Two years after Scott Duniway’s 1873 “Opposition” speech before the Washington Territory Woman Suffrage Association convention and the legislative defeat of the Eldridge suffrage bill, yet another bill, this one introduced by Elwood Evans1, a Republican from Thurston County, failed by eleven votes to fifteen.2 And so woman’s […]
encoded: Meanwhile, back in Washington . . . Two years after Scott Duniway’s 1873 “Opposition” speech before the Washington Territory Woman Suffrage Association convention and the legislative defeat of the Eldridge suffrage bill, yet another bill, this one introduced by Elwood Evans<a href="https://asduniway.org/washington-territory-constitutional-convention/#footnote_1_20" id="identifier_1_20" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="(1828-1898): born Philadelphia; came to Oregon via Panama, 1851, arriving at Steilacoom; went to Washington, D.C., 1852, returning to Washington Territory, 1853, as aide to first territorial governor, Isaac Ingalls Stevens; appointed secretary, Washington Territory, November, 1862; died Tacoma; author, History of the Pacific Northwest; “a lawyer and a public speaker of rare ability” (Scott, History of the Oregon Country 2: 283).">1, a Republican from Thurston County, failed by eleven votes to fifteen.2 And so woman’s enfranchisement remained an open question when the territory’s first constitutional convention convened in Walla Walla in the summer of 1878. On Monday, June 17, Judge Benjamin Dennison<a href="https://asduniway.org/washington-territory-constitutional-convention/#footnote_3_20" id="identifier_3_20" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="Benjamin F. Dennison: appointed by legislature to board of regents, University of Washington, 1866-67, and elected president; appointed by governor to three-person commission charged with revising and codifying territorial law, c. 1868; appointed by President Ulysses S. Grant chief justice of territorial supreme court, 1869-71; delegate, territorial constitutional convention, 1878 (which Scott Duniway also attended and addressed), which guaranteed right of women to pursue “any lawful business, avocation, or profession” but failed to remove gender as qualification for voting (Bancroft, History of Washington 216, 273, 279, 290-91).">3, delegate of the second judicial distri…

“CONSTITUTIONAL LIBERTY AND THE ARISTOCRACY OF SEX” – January 19, 1877
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-11T23:07:14Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: Scott Duniway was born and spent her childhood in Pleasant Grove, Illinois, in Tazewell County, before departing for the Oregon Territory in 1852, at the age of 17. Thus, this speech, delivered before the Illinois state legislature, represented a homecoming for her. Scott Duniway stopped in Springfield following a trip east.1 She reported having been […]
encoded: Scott Duniway was born and spent her childhood in Pleasant Grove, Illinois, in Tazewell County, before departing for the Oregon Territory in 1852, at the age of 17. Thus, this speech, delivered before the Illinois state legislature, represented a homecoming for her. Scott Duniway stopped in Springfield following a trip east.<a href="https://asduniway.org/%e2%80%9cconstitutional-liberty-and-the-aristocracy-of-sex%e2%80%9d/#footnote_1_18" id="identifier_1_18" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="Apparently at the invitation of childhood schoolmate (in Stout’s Grove, Illinois, during the winter of 1850-1851) Shelby Moore Cullom (1829-1914), who, as a representative from Illinois, had introduced the first comprehensive anti-polygamy legislation in Congress in 1869, was about to join Lincoln’s law firm in Springfield, and in 1883 would enter the U.S. Senate, where he would serve for thirty years (Moynihan, Rebel 11; Grimes 33).">1 She reported having been “thoroughly ill for most of the time for six weeks” prior to the address, which interrupted her work and travel to the extent that she complained of being unable “to do more than half duty.” But, having “laid by for repairs, like a damaged locomotive,” she “whipped up [her] lagging strength and went to Springfield, where, on the evening of the 19th, [she] had the honor of meeting one of the most intelligent audiences ever assembled to listen to the gospel of freedom.” Not all of her audience were paid such compliments. Reflecting on the newly-built statehouse in Springfield, she later reported: “it is laughable to see the little aristocrats put on airs of superiority over the subjugated and misrepresented sex.” This, she hastened to add, did not include all or even a majority of its honorable members: “the feeling here for woman’s enfranchisement is so strong that the dear old Prairie State might be made the Banner State of the great reform; but we mean the little aristocrats–little in brain and tyranni…

“THE DESTINY OF OUR REPUBLIC” – October 5, 1874
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-11T21:53:31Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: This lengthy address is particularly interesting as a window not simply onto Scott Duniway’s views on suffrage and prohibition but onto her broader reformist spirit. In it, she first offers her views on human motivation, echoing the liberal belief that environment influences behavior and the progressivist credo that improvements in the human condition will improve […]
encoded: This lengthy address is particularly interesting as a window not simply onto Scott Duniway’s views on suffrage and prohibition but onto her broader reformist spirit. In it, she first offers her views on human motivation, echoing the liberal belief that environment influences behavior and the progressivist credo that improvements in the human condition will improve the human mind and spirit. She then touches upon the need for a variety of reforms, including, to be sure, woman suffrage and temperance, but focusing in particular on economic inequalities that, she argues, are the root cause of poverty and crime. Scott Duniway vigorously attacks those monopolists who have “over-reached their neighbors” by amassing vast wealth. Although she prefers allusion and does not “name names,” she has in mind capitalists like the banks and railroads.<a href="https://asduniway.org/%e2%80%9cthe-destiny-of-our-republic%e2%80%9d/#footnote_1_15" id="identifier_1_15" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="The latter, the largest industries of their day, were granted millions of acres of public lands in the west. The federal charter for the Northern Pacific Railroad, which originated in Minnesota and was to terminate in Scott Duniway’s “bailiwick,” was approved in 1864, and–like similar charters for the Southern Pacific and the Santa Fe–granted to the corporation twenty square miles of public land for every mile of track laid (Corning 141; Morison 50-55, 72-76). In 1872–three years after the completion of the transcontinental railroad and two years before Scott Duniway delivered this speech–the infamous Crédit Mobilier scandal, in which Union Pacific officials reaped $23 million in dividends from a bogus construction company and passed its stock to influential members of Congress, came to public light (“Union Pacific: Chronological History”). On the railroad industry more generally, see Blackford and Kerr (126-65). Abigail may have felt a slight twinge of ambivalence on thi…

“OPPOSITION” – November 5, 1873
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-11T21:29:21Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: The question of equal suffrage was a lively topic for public and political debate very early in Washington’s history, and Abigail Scott Duniway was a major figure almost from the beginning.1 The question was considered as early as 1854, when a bill was introduced in the lower house of the territory’s first legislature. The bill […]
encoded: The question of equal suffrage was a lively topic for public and political debate very early in Washington’s history, and Abigail Scott Duniway was a major figure almost from the beginning.<a href="https://asduniway.org/%e2%80%9copposition%e2%80%9d/#footnote_1_13" id="identifier_1_13" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="She told the N.W.S.A. convention in 1884 that, for twelve and one-half years, she had divided her time roughly equally between Oregon and Washington, lecturing in each about seventy times per year. Much of the brief history that follows is derived from Larson (“Washington”), Edwards (Sowing), and Mary Olney Brown’s account in History of Woman Suffrage (3: 780-86).">1 The question was considered as early as 1854, when a bill was introduced in the lower house of the territory’s first legislature. The bill lost by one vote and the issue died until the territory’s election code of 1866 granted suffrage to “all white citizens,” whereupon enterprising suffrage advocates seized the opportunity to argue that women were citizens. In 1869 another bill was introduced, unsuccessfully, in the upper house. After trying unsuccessfully to vote a year earlier, sisters Mary Olney Brown and Charlotte Olney French in 1870 persuaded election judges in two King County precincts to construe the 1866 code favorably, and a few women actually voted, provoking considerable discussion. In August, 1871, Laura de Force Gordon<a href="https://asduniway.org/%e2%80%9copposition%e2%80%9d/#footnote_2_13" id="identifier_2_13" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="(1838-1907): attorney, editor, reformer; lecturer on spiritualism; edited and published variety of newspapers including, in 1874, Stockton Daily Leader, supposedly only daily in world edited by woman at time, and later Oakland Daily Democrat; instrumental in founding California Woman Suffrage Association, 1870; president, 1877, 1884-94; shared Scott Duniway’s views on prohibition and suspicion…

SAN FRANCISCO COUNTY WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION – January 4, 1871
type: item
creator: admin
date: 2010-11-10T08:00:00Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: The onset of Scott Duniway’s oratorical career is well-known. By her own account, her “maiden speech” occurred during the “log cabin and hard cider” campaign of 1840, when Abigail was about six years old and the Scott family was living in the village of Wesley, on the banks of the Illinois River: “William Henry Harrison […]
encoded: The onset of Scott Duniway’s oratorical career is well-known. By her own account, her “maiden speech” occurred during the “log cabin and hard cider” campaign of 1840, when Abigail was about six years old and the Scott family was living in the village of Wesley, on the banks of the Illinois River: “William Henry Harrison was the presidential candidate, and, my father being an uncompromising Whig, I naturally partook of his ardor. I remember calling the village children together under the shade of a sycamore tree, where I climbed to a horizontal limb and harangued them about ‘Tippecanoe and Tyler too.’”1 Regrettably, the text of this inaugural harangue–and many other early efforts–is lost. So we must settle for the following. In 1870, Abigail was a 36-year-old wife and mother of six. The family had lived for five years in Albany, a prosperous community in the Willamette Valley, south of Salem, where Scott Duniway at first taught school and then began a successful millinery shop. For some time (at least since 1858), she had been nursing her dream of being a writer. Her first novel, Captain Gray’s Company, or Crossing the Plains and Living in Oregon (the first commercially printed novel in Oregon), had appeared in April, 1859. And she had contributed periodically, both pseudonymously and as herself, to area presses (particularly the Oregon City Argus and Oregon Farmer) on a variety of topics of the day, but notably concerning women’s issues such as education, overwork, and matrimony. Her modest reputation as an author2 and the nature of her business brought her into contact with other women who looked to her as confidant and benefactor. Her experiences with the deprivation and hardship endured by these housewives and widows were an important factor in what she later would call her “third and latest birth.” She determined to do more to improve women’s lot. And, because she longed to be a writer, she determined to start a women’s newspaper.3 In early November, 1870, Scott…